Flashcast 10: 2022 Wrap-up

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Sponsor Read:
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Hello and welcome to the Mac Admins Podcast. I’m your host, Tom Bridge, and it’s great to be back with you, Charles and Marcus. How are you today?

Tom Bridge (00:00:13):
Hello and welcome to the Mac Admins podcast. I’m your host Tom Bridge, and I don’t have the theme music this week. That’s what I forgot to bring with me. I had left it packed up as hos

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:00:22):
Bu there

Tom Bridge (00:00:25):
We’re good

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:00:29):
. We got

Tom Bridge (00:00:30):
It. The, uh, today’s special episode of the, uh, MAC Men’s Podcast is brought to you by kaji, the Apple Device Management and Security platform. If your business uses Con iPhones, conci new managed iOS capabilities help ensure that they’re always running an up to date, uh, with minimal admin effort. Learn more about how conci can orchestrate your Apple devices@kndj.io. Uh, and thanks very much to our friends in Conj. You continue to, uh, sponsor this podcast. So, uh, Marcus, you’re wearing a foundation shirt here on the podcast. Thank you. It does, it is one of my very favorite shirts. Um, I think that is probably, and Emily has the, the CUI for, for her beverage.

Marcus Ransom (00:01:11):
Meko does indeed contain a built-in screen reader. Tom, in case you didn’t know ,

Tom Bridge (00:01:17):
I, I hadn’t. I, I was on a work meeting probably about, I don’t know, two weeks ago. And, uh, somebody was resetting their tester device in the meeting and it started going off and I just stood up because my T-shirt was, I was wearing my foundation T-shirt and I was like, see , this is fun. And everybody got a good chuckle out of it. So,

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:01:37):
But did they then go and buy the shirt afterwards?

Tom Bridge (00:01:39):
I did circulate the link. I can’t say Adam Vo, he bought one. So, you know, I feel like, you know, thank, I’m out here, I’m out here raising the monies all the time. So, but, but that’s it. So, you know, uh, here we are just a couple of days from the end of the year. I think the year is something like 99% complete at this point. Um, I don’t think anything is gonna happen in the next three days to change the major course of the m men’s year. He says crossing his fingers and knocking on wood, or at least laminate. Um, it’s been kind of a year, uh, you know, when it came time to like assemble the, the timeframe, I mean, since 2022 is just about over, let’s kind of talk about everything that’s happened this year as well as maybe make some outrageous and wrong predictions for, uh, 2023.

(00:02:26):
Um, we’ll get to that part, you know, towards the second half of the episode, but we thought it would be fun to get everybody together and talk a little bit about, uh, you know, uh, everything that’s going on. Charles is unfortunately traveling with his family this week. Uh, he couldn’t be joining us, uh, cuz uh, apparently where he is right now, there is no good internet. So, uh, or he is trying to get someplace where there is no good internet. And either of those are perfectly acceptable things. He senses regrets, uh, to everybody out there and wishes you all a very happy night, new year. So, what, where do we wanna start with 2022? I mean, do we want to go back even as far back as the springtime and maybe talk a little bit about, uh, 12.3 and the, and the spring update and talk about the Monterey. That was

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:03:11):
What even was that I don’t even,

Tom Bridge (00:03:15):
I mean, that was

Marcus Ransom (00:03:15):
Kind emotionally detached. Now

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:03:17):
I know. Gosh. Um, uh, if you were lucky, you had been reading the writing on the wall and on the Mac admin Slack and Twitter and wherever else for many moons and new system, Python was going to actually, actually go away at some point. And if you’re lucky, you had your own managed copy of Python deployed to your fleet that you could flip all your stuff over to. Hopefully,

Tom Bridge (00:03:43):
I, I mean hopefully that was the case. I mean, I definitely, you know, I, I know that we found a couple of things that we’d written a while ago here at Jump Cloud, um, that were still out in the public domain that were, you know, dependent upon system, Python being there mm-hmm. , um, we had to make some adjustments, you know, on the fly to make sure that those were fixed. Uh, cuz that wasn’t something that we could rely on anymore. Mac and mens now have the full control over their own Python stack, which is a good thing. Yeah. And maybe you can be on a version of Python that’s, you know, being maintained, which I think is a big part of that.

Marcus Ransom (00:04:13):
And Mike, Mike Lynn, I’m still to this day finding your, you know, run as the currently logged in user Python code all over the place. Just when you think you’ve, it’s like

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:04:28):
That spiders dear friend of the pod.

Marcus Ransom (00:04:31):
Yes.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:04:31):
Uh, van Tom’s blog about, it’s probably still his like, top hit blog post where he threw in a one liner using Python to find the currently logged in user. Oh yeah. We, yeah, we had to dump all of our stuff out of our Jampro instance and then just search the code and try to find everything and, and, and just flip back, fortunately, arm and scrape blog scripting os x os ten.com has some alternatives to that for finding the logged in user that people could flip to. Um,

Marcus Ransom (00:05:05):
That’s fine. It’s, it’s when, when you think about it though, how impressive is it that a couple of members of the Mac admin community, you know, found this way of declaring the current logged in user and shared that. And then when you see just how widespread that line of code was, um,

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:05:26):
How dependent thousands of admins and thousands more organizations, businesses operating in the world, businesses, schools, universities, healthcare institution, government bodies, , it’s pretty amazing, uh, the reach it has

Marcus Ransom (00:05:44):
In an alternate reality. Sam’s Mac Mule, would any of this actually work? Would

Tom Bridge (00:05:51):
Well, I mean, I feel like there are so many members of our community that are that way though. And that is one, one of the beautiful things of being a McMan is that, you know, there are so many great people out there, you know, here I think of, you know, a ton of different people. I mean, I think of, you know, Mike Lynn, I think of Ben Toms, I think of, you know, Adam kga, who’s been a, you know, a real brand ambassador for install maker. Uh, of course Armon Regal, uh, you know, for install a meter itself. You know, so many different people out there who are, you know, picking up the mantle in addition to whatever they’re doing in their day job to make the Mac men’s community better. And that’s really, you know, a big part of, you know, why the foundation, I mean, whose birthday was in May this year.

(00:06:34):
Um, and surprise, well there’s a mc Mens Foundation, uh, was, you know, just such a big triumph for the, for, for 2022. I definitely put that up at the top of my, my parts of my favorite parts of this year. But in addition to the, uh, you know, the deprecation of System Python, um, it 12, the 12.3 update in the springtime brought the arrival of full universal control so that if you’ve got, you know, a fancy iPad that is, you know, right next to your MA machine, you could control the iPad using the keyboard and mouse that were, you know, associated with the same, uh, with your work machine provided that you are all sharing the same, you know, non-managed Apple id. And, uh, you know, that was, you know, a huge benefit for,

Marcus Ransom (00:07:17):
For, is anybody else u using that? Because I know I, I rely on that every day. I’ve got my work set up and my home iMac here on the same desk and just being able to not have to have two sets of keyboards and mice on the desk is just awesome. And to be able to have my personal email on my personal machine, but be able to just mm-hmm. slide the cursor right over there and, um, do what I need to do, it makes it so much easier to actually keep that, um, work and home separate, aside from, uh, using the same Apple id, but to not have to have my email or anything like that. Not have to have, you know, browser history, those sorts of things on my, on my work machine, on my personal machine. But then being able to really kind of operate them as if they’re just separate spaces on the same machine is so much easier and so much better than any of the other solutions I’ve used before trying to achieve the, the same sort of thing.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:08:15):
Yeah. I’m very much of the camp of my personal things do not get signed into on my work things, so I don’t use it. I’ve used it with like my personal Mac and iPad and stuff like that, but I’m paranoid and untrustworthy, untrust, untrusting untrustworthy maybe too. Um, but no, I don’t, uh, I don’t, I don’t use it as don’t, as

Tom Bridge (00:08:41):
Cool as it is. I don’t, I don’t have a, I don’t have a SP so what I’ve ended up doing is that I, so I have a MAC Mini that sits over, you know, close . Um, and so what I end up doing is I, I tail scale, I have a tail scale network here at the house for, for different VLANs and to get through the different VLANs and or for when I’m not at this, you know, desk. Um, and that Mac Mini is where my, you know, personal user session lives. And so it’s close enough that I can still do the Bluetooth stuff cuz it’s, you know, close. Um, and that’s still, still lets me do some of the, the control actions that are there. It’s not the best doing that over Apple remote desktop, but it technically works,

Marcus Ransom (00:09:20):
Which is the best kind of works

Tom Bridge (00:09:23):

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:09:24):
As long as it kind of does until it doesn’t. Yeah. Right.

Marcus Ransom (00:09:27):
Doesn’t that kind of describe being a Mac admin

Tom Bridge (00:09:31):
? I think that’s, yep. I think that’s the case. Rewind

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:09:37):
To Python conversation .

Tom Bridge (00:09:39):
Correct.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:09:40):
Lemme just ask that, that

Tom Bridge (00:09:41):
Link, that linkage is direct. Mm-hmm.

Marcus Ransom (00:09:44):
software Uptide even.

Tom Bridge (00:09:48):
I was trying to keep the show clean, Marcus, now I’m gonna have to like find that and beep it out in the final recording. No, I’m just kidding. Um, but, you know, I think we’ll get to talking about software update a little bit more later in the show as well. Some, well, something else that we got in the 12 three update was the technical preview of paske and, uh, you know, in the full operating system side of the house, um, being able to, at that point use a set of, you know, generated, you know, Fido style tokens that are synced out through the iCloud key chain, uh, between iOS and macros devices and make that truly a passwordless flow, um, where, you know, you authenticate locally to the device and then have access to the private key, which can, you know, be used to, you know, authenticate you, uh, through the public key to, uh, you know, websites and other activities at that point, and treat that as a true, you know, secure passwordless solution. And we got the very first tech preview of that, uh, in the springtime of this year before we get into even, you know, the major implementation of that as part of, uh, apple Summer, uh, updates.

Marcus Ransom (00:10:54):
And I think, I think that’s something we’ve all had to deal with a lot this year is rather than just dealing with the, the new features of operating systems and how to respond to those, um, security of not just, and the security implications of not just the latest versions of Mac o s and iOS, but all of the, we, we’ll use the right word, the legacy versions that, you know, we may or may not have in our fleet there. And, and realizing how many different kind of vulnerabilities there are now that we’re having to deal with, where it’s not necessarily people hacking the operating system or compromising the operating system. And pass Keys is a great example of this. It’s just realizing that passwords, passwords are a bad idea. Um, even, even yesterday we’ve had a whole bunch of Twitter accounts compromised, um, and, you know, including our former Prime Minister and, you know, I, I won’t use the celebrities, I don’t even know if celebrity is the right word for Piers Morgan, um, having Twitter accounts compromised.

(00:11:58):
And so just seeing Apple being on the forefront of there being better ways of identifying yourself to all of these services you use and just waiting for all these services to get on board, even with Last Pass getting compromised, and there’s still oof waiting for some clarity around what that means. Um, and, and the implications of that. Um, even if, even if your password vaults have been captured but not necessarily compromised, I think this is a, a real sign that the sooner we can all get ourselves onto using more robust ways of doing things and secure ways of doing things, we won’t need to be so concerned about those sorts of things. We’ll have other things we can be more concerned about.

Tom Bridge (00:12:47):
The, the thing that I love about past Keys is that they are unfishable because you can’t create like a fishing site that will allow you to use or to reuse a pass key because the domains are drastically different. Even if they are using fake characters, even if they’re using other things like that, you literally can’t use, the operating system will not permit you to use a key, uh, on a domain that’s not registered for it. And so, you know, that’s really, really exciting, uh, to see. I don’t know how well that’s gonna work when organizations need to change names for their logins and things like that. I think that’s gonna be interesting over time. Um, but the prospect of having a credential that just can’t be fished because there’s no way to get the private key material necessary to fully fish. The, the key is just really, that’s the huge benefit. And, you know, I’m really excited to see this develop. I’m, you know, knowing that it’s not just Apple working on it also, but there are workflows that Microsoft’s working on this for workflows that Google’s working on for this for Chrome. Um, it’s just exciting to see kind of a, a universal, you know, cross-platform, cross-industry agreement that, Hey, you know what? Passwords suck and it’s time we got rid of them.

Marcus Ransom (00:14:01):
I, I think that’s also something that 2022 has sort of really displayed is all of these organizations working together, competing in different areas, but also working together and realizing that everybody creating their own standard and their own way of doing things and locking everyone into their own ecosystem just doesn’t work these days. So, you know, looking at, you know, organizations, um, identity providers embracing Apple Single sign and Extension, um, providing great documentation for how to use that and being able to integrate all these things into the operating system and, you know, in Mac os and even iOS, just seeing how much easier it is to be part of a wider enterprise ecosystem rather than, yeah, that doesn’t work, work that doesn’t work, that doesn’t work. Um, so, you know, that that’s, that’s something that I’ve experienced a lot of in 2022. How about, how about both of you? What’s your experience been?

Tom Bridge (00:15:05):
Oh, I totally agree. I mean, I think looking at, for example, the Matter Coalition, which is a bunch of open standards for home, uh, for home kit and other, you know, Alexa used with Alexa, used with Google, used with all of these things and everybody kind of coming together with the realization that, you know what, having a bunch of competing standards really sucks. Um, not just for the people who develop for our platform, but for people who develop elsewhere. If we could build a common, uh, alignment on what it will take, and, you know, here we start to see Apples, uh, you know, with support for Matter, um, in the most recent versions of iOS, Mac os, et cetera. Um, not to mention, you know, uh, having thread radios built into so many different of their products. I, I, I feel like the future is maybe finally, I don’t know, it it, it’s not that the future has been so dim, it’s just been the future has been damned confusing about what works and where, um, I’m really excited to see Matter kind of hit the, the full stream of 1.0 here and the first real accessories out there that can work with Matter come to market.

(00:16:07):
Yeah. Uh, and that’s supposed to be this year.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:16:10):
I feel like part of it too is, and I’m making some assumptions here, but the realization that consumers are okay with living in multiple ecosystems.

Marcus Ransom (00:16:20):
Yeah.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:16:21):
It’s going to be unlikely that one company is going to make every smart thing that a person’s going to want in their house. And also taking the pressure off of organizations like Google or Apple, were Amazon in making a version of everything that a consumer might want, especially the actual logistics of our world economy and availability of materials and marketplace stuff right now to go, you know what, working on a way to build a standard that takes the pressure off is going to be better for us and for consumers. Uh, see that as part of it too, you know? Um,

Marcus Ransom (00:16:57):
So it’s really like the consumer version of employee Choice, really. Like you, you choose the accessories mm-hmm. that do the job you need it to do or, and are actually available and you can afford. Um, and hopefully they can talk to each other and play nicely.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:17:13):
Mm-hmm. ,

Tom Bridge (00:17:15):
It’d be nice if they did it

Marcus Ransom (00:17:17):
.

Tom Bridge (00:17:18):
Um, but that takes us up through the springtime and, you know, uh, we, in May we got the launch of the Mac Mens Foundation and I think, you know, we’ve kind of beaten that dead horse, uh, you know, well into oblivion at this point. You know, the foundation’s here we’re really excited. Never could. No, we

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:17:31):
Have to talk about it all the time forever. And you have to keep giving us money.

Tom Bridge (00:17:35):
. True. Cuz we do still need to keep paying for Slack. That’s true. Um, that is, that is one of the, you know, the predominant reasons that we started the Macin Men’s Foundation was that paying for Slack is expensive and it’s easier

Marcus Ransom (00:17:47):
If, how many Lamborghini to,

Tom Bridge (00:17:49):
Uh, is two Ferrari, two Ferrari, two Ferrari was, uh, two Ferrari was what it cost for one year of Slack for the number of, uh, people in Slack that we have today. Um, and you know, I mean, I don’t think I could do my job as a McMan without the McMan slack, or at least it would be a lot harder. Um, so knowing that that’s there, we wanted to launch a foundation, um, to start to work for industry support for, uh, you know, the Mac and been Slack. Not to mention, you know, build some better products for the community. Um, like for example, a scholarship program. And that’s one of the things that we launched with Apple this year, or our launching with Apple this year. Um, as it turns out, it’s very complicated to get money. Um, and sometimes getting money requires being approved by the IRS and a bunch of other things along those lines. Not to mention jumping through literally every bureaucratic hoop that I think we could have thrown at us. Um,

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:18:42):
Funnily enough too, and this may shock some of you, it’s very hard to spend money sometimes too. Yes. In particular, big lump sums for things like voucher codes for training and certification through third parties. . Uh,

Tom Bridge (00:18:59):
You know, we, we really appreciate our partner, our partnership with our friends at Pearson mm-hmm. , but it has been a lot harder to give them money than I really think it should be.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:19:06):
And, you know, to, to give them credit, right? We’re a brand new organization. We’ve only been an official 5 0 1 [inaudible] [inaudible] for seven months.

Tom Bridge (00:19:16):
Six months now. Seven. Yeah. Something like that. So

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:19:19):
Vetting makes a lot of sense, but at the same time, it’s hard for a small organization at, on the flip side to try to jump through all the bureau bureaucratic hoops and red tape and all the other stuff to prove that yes, we will cut this check and it will not bounce. And we have good intention behind what we’re trying to do and kudos to the other members of the board who have been a lot more hands on with that than me. We’ll just put it that way. ,

Tom Bridge (00:19:46):
I guess we, there’s, there’s been a lot of email. There’s been some phone calls, you know, lots of things are going on in the background, but we’ll be excited to get a bunch of people their, uh, voucher codes very, very early next year. Mm-hmm. , uh, now to mention, you know, 2023 is gonna be a big year for us as, as conferences start to happen in person again. Mm-hmm. . Um, and you know, we’ve had great conversations with the folks at Mac Aduc. Um, they’re the first conference next year, at least the, well, I’m sorry, they’re the second conference cuz Marcus, Marcus, you’ve got news for us. Tell us more about the news.

Marcus Ransom (00:20:14):
Yes, uh, EXW Exw is back and live and in person, um, and in Melbourne. So March 30 to 31st, um, here in Melbourne. Um, details will be coming very soon, uh, early Jan. The, um, the call for presenters will be out. Um, but there’s uh, there’s an X World channel in the Mac admin Slack or the AUC discord. Um, auc.edu.au um, will be where you can find information or, uh, on, on the podcast. But after several years of hiatus, um, it’s can be really good to see people again at a conference down here in

Tom Bridge (00:20:58):
Australia. I can’t wait. I’m really, really excited, uh, you know, to come back down for that one. So, uh, you know, if I can make it work, I gotta, I gotta go talk to the budget people and, and ask them very nicely, Hey, can I go to Australia for fun? I mean conference, I mean for work. Work totally. Work related. Definitely work will happen 100% all about work while I’m there. Um, but you know, we’ll see, we’ll see how that goes. Uh, you know, I’m, I’m, I’ve definitely marked those days on the calendar. It’s on the family calendar, so it’s gonna happen. Yeah. Um, but, you know, hoping to get back down to Melbourne cuz one, that city is amazing and, uh, two, uh, I can’t wait to see everybody in person, but the idea is that we’ll be trying to, to provide scholarships to go to these conferences because, you know, I mean, when we got together as a group to talk more about what was really making the Mac and men’s world, uh, you know, good was going to these conferences. Not everybody has an employer that’s gonna pay for them to go. And sometimes an expensive conference, um, can be out of reach for a lot of people. So we wanna make sure that we can boost people who have never been to conferences, get them there, get them keyed into the community, um, in new and different ways. So that’s one of the things that we’re gonna be working on early in 2023.

Marcus Ransom (00:22:12):
Awesome.

Tom Bridge (00:22:13):
But, um,

Marcus Ransom (00:22:14):
So what other con what other conferences have you got got planned throughout the year? Sofa? We’ve

Tom Bridge (00:22:18):
Got Mac Aduc is on board. Um, and they have, uh, you know, provided an excellent partnership for us. Um, that’s happening in May. We’ve got some meetings lined up in, uh, the early part of next year to talk with, uh, some folks who are working on other conferences during the year. Uh, and we’ll have a lot more to say for as the foundation as we get into the springtime.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:22:38):
Uh, Penn State is happening in July, right? That would be the next one. Penn

Tom Bridge (00:22:44):
State is happening in July and Mac Dev Ops is, I believe, happening in late June. Um, oh, that’s right. And so, you know, both of those are conferences that we are talking to. We’re still working it out, all the details.

Marcus Ransom (00:22:57):
And then we’ve got Janek, uh, later on in the year. So the, the second in-person januk in the, in the now times, um,

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:23:05):
In Austin.

Tom Bridge (00:23:06):
I was gonna say,

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:23:07):
Can’t wait to welcome you all down.

Marcus Ransom (00:23:09):
Yes. I’m, I’m backyard. I’m very much hoping to get over for that one and, and I’m looking forward

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:23:15):
To it. Make sure if you’re coming, I know September and you’re thinking, oh, it’ll be temperate. No, it’ll probably be very hot. Pack your nicest conference, attending shorts and shirts,

Tom Bridge (00:23:27):
,

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:23:28):
Bring a swimsuit and some trunks and a maybe a towel so you can enjoy hotel pools while you’re here cuz it’ll, it’ll be hot guaranteed, but it’ll be so much fun.

Tom Bridge (00:23:40):
Uh, Austin. Well, Austin’s such

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:23:41):
A fun, sounds pretty fun.

Tom Bridge (00:23:42):
Yeah. Um, and I was gonna say, if I get the chance to crash, uh, I’m very definitely hitting up the pinball place, so,

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:23:50):
Oh, we will make sure that pinballs happens. Excellent. Uh, officially or unofficially pinballs will happen. I, this is reminding me, and we don’t have to stop here while I look this up, but the Austin FC schedule was released for next

Marcus Ransom (00:24:04):
Year.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:24:06):
An Austin FC game during J Knock would be super fun, but I don’t know if there’s a home game or not. I’m looking right now in real time, cuz I am not prepared. Let’s see, September 20th. No, it’s an away game. There’s one on the 17th, so if people are flying in early, there is a game at Q2 Stadium on the 17th, and if you’re staying late Yeah, there’s a game on the 24th at Q2 with LA Galaxy, which would be fun too. So we’ll have to have some conversations about that as we Exactly closer.

Tom Bridge (00:24:45):
Oh, you guys, I’m so excited. We have, um, finally made it on Twitch. We’ve gotten our very first spam comment. They want to offer promotion of our channel viewers, followers of views and chatbots. The price is lower than any competitor. The quality is guaranteed. Don’t

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:25:02):
Yay, don’t

Tom Bridge (00:25:05):
Dog joe.com . Thank you. You know, don’t go check out that website. I guarantee you nothing good is happening there.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:25:13):
We’re giving ’em free airtime, which is probably a mistake, but you have to celebrate your first, your first spam post,

Marcus Ransom (00:25:19):
Don’t you? This is why we need pass keys folks.

Tom Bridge (00:25:22):
Yep, that is exactly right. So

Marcus Ransom (00:25:25):
What about conferences? What about conferences this year? Oh, in, in 2022. So what was the conference landscape like for everyone this year?

Tom Bridge (00:25:34):
You know, it was, it was pretty online only. I mean, with the exception of, uh, of Mac of Macd Duck and Brighton where I got Covid

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:25:42):
And Jane in San Diego

Tom Bridge (00:25:44):
Yes. Where other people got covid. So, not

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:25:48):
Surprisingly, from what I heard, fewer than expected. Not that, not that many. And I think what helped is that they required attendees be vaccinated to go in. And I think that I love that helped a lot. And I am very appreciative of the conference organizers for making that decision.

Tom Bridge (00:26:08):
I hope that continues. I do too. Just saying friends out there, um, that would be a great way to, um, you know, encourage me to attend is to make sure that everybody is, uh, vaccinated. Um, so

Marcus Ransom (00:26:19):
Also normalize wearing of masks in conferences if somebody wants to wear a mask Yeah. For that. Not to be seen as being weird, but seen as being awesome, being a good thing if you’re gonna be around that many people. Um,

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:26:33):
Yeah. You know, there was a comment in the chat here too that outdoor meals helped. I think they did. I wish the outdoor meals were better so that I felt more inclined to go out, sit in the, out outside in the heat and the sun to eat them. But that’s a other conversation. But yeah, all of the, the provided meals, the, uh, in particular the big lunches every day throughout j o were all outside. Um, which was cool. Um, I think that helped. But yeah, normalizing, masking a big one. I know, I’ll admit I didn’t mask much while I was at the conference, but I did when I was traveling, when I was in Ubers and Lyfts and at the airport and on the airplane, and I wore a mask pretty much the whole time. Um, but you kinda have to make those decisions for yourself. Right. But I think the US is getting a bit better about it now. Maybe I’m sheltered being in Austin. know.

Tom Bridge (00:27:25):
I mean, there are still, you know, I mean, COVID continues to be a problem. Yes. And it is still a risk of long-term, you know, real disablement and, and problematic for and problematic symptoms for folks. I know folks fighting long covid now who have been, you know, testing clean for 18 months mm-hmm. Um, but still dealing with side effects of their, of their original, uh, infection. So, you know, definitely, you know, normalize that wearing a masks, it does help. It is not a problem. Um, I mean, obviously if you wanna take it off while you’re giving your talk and put it right back on, that sounds like a really good middle ground to be in. Um, but yeah, I was gonna say, I’m really hopeful for, as we get into 2023, uh, folks will, uh, continue to do good work there. So, um, you know, I I think that as we get back to, you know, uh, normalizing conferences, I think that’s gonna be helpful.

Marcus Ransom (00:28:15):
So speaking of conferences, um, apple themselves have a pretty important conference, uh, in June. So yeah, once we’ve gotten through the spring updates, everyone was preparing themselves to see what we’d have to be dealing with what the rest of 2022 and 2023 was like.

Tom Bridge (00:28:32):
Well, and you know, I I will say that, you know, some Mac admins did get selected for the special in-person event, uh, at, uh, a Worldwide Developer’s conference in, in Cupertino. They had a events at the new developer center, uh, that is part of the Apple Park campus, um, which I would love to see one day. I think that sounds pretty cool. Um, you know, I think that there is a lot to love in terms of, uh, getting people together to in, in spaces like this. But in addition to that, um, you know, it, we got, uh, brand new operating systems like we do every year now. Uh, we got a brand new version of iOS 16, a brand new version of IPA os uh, 16.1 is what shipped at the end of the day. Um, and then, um, MAC OS 13 Ventura. Uh, and so, you know, what did you guys think of the, of the initial set of consumer features that are associated with these Before we dive really deeply into the, uh, you know, the, the, the admin facing features here.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:29:29):
I’m still deeply horribly disappointed that we are not back on cat names

Tom Bridge (00:29:34):
. And

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:29:35):
That’s really where my line is

Tom Bridge (00:29:39):
Respect.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:29:40):
I can know that. Bring back the cat names, bring back the felines. Apple

Marcus Ransom (00:29:43):
Makos 14 Calico is what I’ll be hoping for. Yes.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:29:47):
Let’s go.

Marcus Ransom (00:29:48):
Daisy

Tom Bridge (00:29:49):
Macko is 15 tuxedo, right? Like, I feel like these are all, uh, appropriate

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:29:53):
Makos 16 domestic short hair. We gotta give some love to the, the Kitty Mutts. Let’s go.

Marcus Ransom (00:29:58):
I’ve already got my little kitty ornament for the Calico operating system.

Tom Bridge (00:30:03):
Excellent.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:30:04):
She’s already on it, man. That’s

Tom Bridge (00:30:06):
Great. Yeah. I’ll tell you. Yeah. Um, but, you know, as we get into the, the, the features here, this seems to be a major refinement of existing features, not necessarily, you know, blockbuster new features of the operating system this year. Um, and you know, I think that overall it was exciting to see some things, uh, this year, uh, get major improvements, maps got a, you know, a bunch of new, uh, features and functionality. I absolutely love the route planning features that are available now in maps where you can set multiple, you know, finally this is one of those like true, honest to God finally, um, moments for maps. Um, but it’s so good. Um, and I’m glad they, I’m glad they got, when they released it, it wasn’t, you know, uh, half-assed

Marcus Ransom (00:30:50):
The MA machine learning integration across operating systems as well so that the intuitiveness of maps to be able to work out where you might be wanting to go and why you might be wanting to do things. Um, and, you know, the surprise and delight term that we used to use all the time when I was at Apple Retail and seeing that actually happen where sitting there trying to work out how to plan something on a, on a map, and it’s already got it sorted out for you and go, I reckon you are gonna want to do this, this, and this. And it’s like, oh, oh, thank you, thank you. That’s, that’s saved me a bunch of time trying to work that out. And s seeing all the different parts of the operating system and all the information that the operating system’s got start to work nicely with each other. Um, the other one I know I’ve jumped up and down about this as well is the shared eye photo libraries, shared photo libraries, um, how easy that was to set up. Um, and, you know, still wanna be able to set that as the default album, um, of all time on, on devices. But previous efforts at messing about with the photo library ended in disaster. This one didn’t. And I think that’s a mm-hmm. , a lot of effort has gone into the engineering of that product to make it work so well.

Tom Bridge (00:32:16):
Absolutely. And, you know, I think that there were, were some also very strongly needed, uh, improvements to, you know, mail for example, to try to bring it up with a parody with some of the web clients, um, so that you could schedule emails to go out, that you could recall messages if they hadn’t been sent for very long. You know, building some of those, you know, nice to have featured snoozing messages, for example. Um, quality of life functionality, uh, that’s available now in some of Apple’s native tools. Um, I mean, I don’t think it’s gonna kick anybody outta Gmail yesterday, uh, but, uh, you know, it’s nice to have some good options there. Yeah. I mean, looking at the features list, you know, we got some, uh, better results out of, uh, spotlight with richer detail, more detailed cards, uh, in the spotlight, uh, you know, piece. Um, not to mention, you know, uh, uh, oh God, how could I even skip over this editing messages Yeah. So that you can fix your typos. Oh my God. , I can’t tell you how, how you, how critical this feature has been and, uh, was how, how much

Marcus Ransom (00:33:18):
Blurring shade at Twitter, being able to edit messages or

Tom Bridge (00:33:22):
or

Marcus Ransom (00:33:23):
Just a real world

Tom Bridge (00:33:23):
Example. If I had to guess, uh, who was gonna get it first? It was G not gonna be iMessage. Yeah. Um, but they have surpassed the folks at Twitter, that’s for sure.

Marcus Ransom (00:33:33):
Once again, showing that this is an important thing that people need to be able to do.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:33:38):
I forgot that that was a thing. I don’t think I’ve done it yet. I’ve only just started doing replies to specific messages, which I think was a few os versions old at this point.

Tom Bridge (00:33:48):
, yeah. I think that, I think that was two or three years ago, but yeah, it’s so clutch though. Yeah. I mean, I’m starting to feel like messages is a, is a product with a lot more detail in it than it, than it’s had in the past.

Marcus Ransom (00:33:58):
Usually it’s when you are, when you’re in a message with somebody else, like Damien Kavanaugh, thank you for encouraging me or shaming me into using those features of replying in messages because, you know, he’s definitely someone who loves using those things as soon as they come out and embracing them for the benefits they have and, and encouraging my old man brain to start using new things and new ways of doing things.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:34:27):
I, I don’t know if this is on our list, but the, like, uh, what do they call it? Image isolation, where it will Oh yeah. Look at the image, figure out the subjects and give you the, uh, give you, it’s like the, almost the opposite of which I think is funny of some of the stuff that Google’s done with Pixel, where you can remove objects from an image and keep kind of the background for Apple. It’s like, no, you can pull the subjects out and keep them and paste them into a message or save them into a new picture or whatever. Uh, we use that a lot. I use that one a lot. That’s probably the biggest consumer, new consumer feature in iOS 16 that, that, that we use

Marcus Ransom (00:35:03):
In our house. So Emily, as a new puppy owner, has that been a useful feature to have?

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:35:09):
If we can get her still long enough to take a picture of her, I’m sure it’ll be great.

Tom Bridge (00:35:13):
. Yeah. Yeah. That’s the thing about puppies for sure. Um, you know, I think that the other pieces that we get, uh, this year in the con uh, consumer features is continuity camera. Yeah. And the ability to use your, you know, very fancy iPhone, uh, with, uh, your, uh, maybe equally fancy yet poor, poor camera having MacBook Pro mm-hmm. , um, and use it as the, the camera for, for your MacBook Pro. So it’s

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:35:39):
Almost like, shout out to Bekin for the accessories for it. . Which feels funny to say. Um, as a side story, I’m a Nintendo kid through and through and Nintendo’s game is always the super random proprietary accessories. It has been forever. Crazy Controller colors and Game Boy card readers and Game Boy cartridge readers for N 64 controllers and the whole thing down the line. Right. Uh, I love a good accessory game, the Bekin accessories to work with continuity cameras. So they clip on your monitors and stuff. Super cool. Um, I finally got in a order for the, the first one that they released and there’ll be links and the show notes for people that wanna see, um, was specifically for the MacBook. It has the tiniest little, we’re on Twitch, so I can do this. It has the tiniest little clip mm-hmm. . It’s very, very narrow.

(00:36:28):
It’s really designed just for a MacBook. Um, they’ve got a new one that they released not too long ago that is more like the Stan you see on typical webcams where it’s kind of got a swivel arm that you can move around and has little padding. So it’ll sit on a wider monitor. Uh, I’m looking forward to that cuz then I’ll be able to do the full switch cuz I’m on a monitor all day. I, I don’t sit with my, my MacBook in front of me. Um, I love, I love good accessories, but yeah, continuity cameras. Even the nicest, most expensive webcam. You guy cannot touch the lenses on an iPhone. They just can’t. It, there’s no comparison. It’s not even close. And, and

Marcus Ransom (00:37:08):
Already it’s just the lenses. It’s also a software driving, driving mm-hmm. that as well. And mm-hmm. taking photos of a cute little adorable cat over the last couple of weeks and just realizing, you know, how quickly it can detect the subject, change the depth of field, change the focus really quickly. And it’s like, I, I’m not, I’m not a good photographer, but I now have a good photographer inside my phone that can, you know, make good choices for me. And being able, being able to bring that into, you know, video conferencing as well, which is not going away. It’s something I’ve found that even though no, you know, moving into my new role, even though we’re we’re opened up and allowed to go and see customers, which I’ve really enjoyed doing. Um, the majority of people, you know, they’re not gonna come into the office just to see me.

(00:38:00):
Um, and it’s so much easier, especially if they’ve, you know, they’re working, you know, fully remote or in a hybrid role or something like that. It’s just so much easier to be able to jump on a quick call, um, video call and resolve some problems and then, you know, meet up for lunch or, or coffee or something like that. Um, do business over video and, you know, do networking and social things and getting to know people in, in person. So having a really solid video conferencing set up is vital to jobs these days. And yeah. Seeing, seeing Apple join in on that and encourage people to be able to get really good at it, to be able to do multi-camera angles, all of those sorts of things. Um,

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:38:46):
Yeah, I really, really hope that with some new version of T B O S maybe next year Oh yes. We get continuity camera for TV os so that you can turn your TV setup up into like Absolutely. Like a FaceTime app. Be able use your can’t please.

Tom Bridge (00:39:03):
I, that’s an A 15 in there now. So I mean like the brand, I mean cause we’re, we’re getting to hardware, but like the, you know, there were released a new version of the, uh, the Apple TV 4K at the end of the year. Um, it’s got an A 15 in there, so I mean it’s got a Beastie processor in there. It ought to be able to handle this. Please. Pretty please. Let’s figure out how to do

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:39:22):
This. It would be, we bought one of those Facebook portals a while ago when it was on sale, which kind of is like, it, it looks like a giant and it looks like the Logitech things you see in conference rooms, in, in bus, in, you know, offices. Right. That you have to like, have a Facebook account to even to sign into it to get into other things. And we FaceTime with all our family. Like, it’d be cool if I could just FaceTime man, just come on Apple. Yeah. Meet us somewhere on this one. Please. Um, I also wanted to say, Marcus, I would a hundred percent go into the office to see you if only we lived a little closer to each

Marcus Ransom (00:39:57):
Other. Exactly. Exactly.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:39:58):
If a champ wants to fly me to Australia so that we can hang out in the office together, maybe we can meet each other partway and meet in the New Tokyo office and go hang out

Marcus Ransom (00:40:07):
There. There, there. We, we don’t actually technically have an office in Melbourne, so I think that’s a, you know Right. You know, in the spirit of compromise, I would

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:40:15):
Yeah,

Marcus Ransom (00:40:16):
I, I would Seems fair. Stretch that to flying to Tokyo for us to have a be fair coffee in the Tokyo office. Maybe some sushi as well.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:40:24):
That sounds amazing.

Tom Bridge (00:40:26):
Anyway, I’m here for that. Um, we’ll

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:40:28):
Bring Tom out too.

Tom Bridge (00:40:29):
Yeah. I, I, I, I’ll figure out how to

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:40:31):
This co-chair of the Mac Abs foundation, we will have you out.

Tom Bridge (00:40:34):
Uh, well I will mention, you know, the, the, the McIn Men’s Foundation does not pay for its board members to do anything. No. Um, because we have, we have better things to spend our money on. Yes. Um, and, uh, that is scholarships and, uh, you know, programs and other things along those lines, so mm-hmm. , um, you know, don’t think that, you know, the, the, the McIn mens, oh, Daisy daisy ka.

(00:40:56):
Yes. We have a, we have a very cute little cat, you know, a photo bombing here at the moment. Um, in addition to all of those consumer facing features, we also got some new admin facing features and security protocols. I wanna talk about rapid security response cuz it’s been the most interesting in the last couple month. Last month or so, apple announced at Worldwide Developers Conference, the ability to patch the operating system in a new way, uh, using what they’re calling rapid security response updates. These are for applications that are part of the system, but that are, um, you know, in their own crypt X, which is their own like encrypted disc image, um, can be updated without necessarily unsealing the operating system boot volume, doing a major change, resealing the volume and doing those kind of things. It’s just like picking up a little module and dropping in a new one. These are of course, controllable via MDM commands. And, uh, we’ve had our first tests of RSR now on the iOS and Mac OS sides. Um, but, you know, it’s not clear what got delivered. It’s not clear what those things are. However, you can, uh, if you’re logged into Appleseed, read more about the test plan and I strongly encourage every admin out there to go look at the test plan mm-hmm. and see what kind of things you’re gonna need to be able to manage and what kind of decisions you’re gonna wanna make,

Marcus Ransom (00:42:21):
But also provide feedback. Uh, this is something, this is something that I’ve, I’ve found really, really powerful experience this year with some of the other items that were at least a dub dub was the feedback from the MAC admin community testing these things, an Apple listening to that feedback and then modifying, um, rethinking, changing updating. Um, so, you know, think of the applications. You know, we, we throw out all sorts of shade to software update, um, the number of moving pieces there are in something like R S R, um, and this expectation that it’s just gonna work beautifully in the preview period. Well, this is why we are looking at it. So do your best to break it and provide that feedback back to Apple so they can understand how this is working outside of pr Pretend co out in the wild where mm-hmm. , you know, we are doing all sorts of other crazy stuff in our environments. Um, or we are looking at things from a slightly different, um, point of view, um, from the other side of the operating system. Um, so, you know, I can’t encourage people strongly enough to go in there and not just test, but provide feedback so we can, we can enjoy this working beautifully.

Tom Bridge (00:43:42):
Yeah. And you know, I think that that’s, you know, another big piece of this year’s, uh, worldwide Developers conference is that Apple is now, uh, putting more control of what log, uh, what items are, are loaded by the operating system in the hands of the users. And so, you know, we got a, uh, a brand new, uh, you know, feature here where, hey, are you installing a piece of security software? Are you installing a piece of, uh, recurring software like Dropbox that always loads in the background, something with a Launch demon or, uh, something that AU automatically launches during, uh, you know, uh, user login

Marcus Ransom (00:44:16):
Or have you created a script that runs at login to tweak the doc or any number of things that an admin may, may be doing. So it may not be an application, it may not be a piece of software you’ve installed. Mm-hmm. it may be something you were doing to work around some inefficiencies in some of the, you know, management frameworks or applications or the MDM protocol or, or anything like that. Um, so yeah, this was fun, wasn’t it?

Tom Bridge (00:44:46):
Oh, yeah. Because this was not something that Mac bins had any control over when it was released as part of the early betas of Mac Ventura. And so, you know, thanks to a, uh, feedback campaign conducted, uh, you know, largely out of the Appleseed community, um, you know, apple has now provided a, uh, payload for managing login items. And so you can, um, you know, set a, you know, a specific, uh, code signing identity. You can set a bundle identifier, you can set, set, uh, prefixes for either of those things. So maybe starts with, or, you know, it contains, uh, options there. Um, and, uh, can, uh, you know, allow list certain software, for example, JumpCloud as an agent that’s installed on all of our, the machines that we manage. Um, and obviously that’s not something you want to turn on or turn off. So, you know, we’ve, we, we, we had to allow list ourselves, um, as part of our MDM specification, uh, piece. And that’s really, really important. Um, not to mention, I know the JF has ’em for the app installers and for the, for the Jamf agent. And so that if you’re managed, you want those things on there. That’s the whole point.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:45:56):
And ancillary products like protect and connect Yeah. And other things, the Damon that helps, uh, grease the gears of all the different jam components that run on a device. Yeah. It’s a whole thing. Um, and just like every other organization we at JF had to validate it for ourselves, right? Mm-hmm. , um, make sure it was working the way that we expected and file lots of feedback on it early, early on in the process, both as a vendor and as an Apple customer, you know,

Marcus Ransom (00:46:30):
And trying to get that, those configuration profiles that we got fairly late in the beta period onto devices. But the age old problem of not being able to preload those profiles on Monterey because Monterey doesn’t know about them. So having to get them onto a device as soon as it’s on Ventura, but quickly as soon as it’s on Ventura. So wouldn’t it be great if there was a better way to do this, um, for MDM to work based on the, the state of the device rather than just receiving almost

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:47:05):
Like if the device could attest its own information to a server rather than waiting for the server to ask and then replying novel concept. It’s,

Tom Bridge (00:47:18):
It’s almost like you’re talking about a declarative model of device management. Wow. And so, yes, we did get a lot of news about Apple’s declarative device management frameworks at Mac at, uh, WWDC this year. They are now fully available for all enrollment types and platforms on Mac os, iost, V o s and IPA os, which is Marvelous News. Yeah. Um, and Apples pretty much come out and said, Hey, but at this point, um, the MDMs pack, it’s not going anywhere. Yeah. But we’re not putting our efforts into, uh, you know, enhancing it any further. All of our enhancements are going toward our declarative device management platforms. So, uh, really excited to see what the future of device management’s gonna hold when we can base what happens on the device, on the device’s own intelligence based on its own status, so that you could precede a profile like this that says, Hey, when your operating system is iOS 16 or higher Iowa or Mac o s 13 or higher in, you know, invoke this, this profile and install it,

Marcus Ransom (00:48:21):
And that will, that will then hopefully solve this problem. I know I had had a lot of people saying, oh, this is really great. We can use Declarative to get these background login item profiles on devices. Except the problem is declarative only worked once the device was in Ventura. So by then you kind of needed the profile. But the idea is, is that next time, um, we will have all of this in place. So we’ve got the framework now to be able to build on that and to be able to solve those problems. So all of the fun workarounds that, uh, MDM providers have had to, well, device management providers have had to build because the MDM protocol up until now couldn’t handle that. Um, it’s, it’s really exciting. It’s, it’s really interesting, especially th this has been spoken about for so long, um, actually seeing it arrive, and for me, seeing that arrive in Makos probably a year earlier than I’d really expected it to arrive was a really, really good sign. Um,

Tom Bridge (00:49:19):
For sure. And you know, we, this year we also saw the first two major MDMs, uh, embrace declarative, you know, I mean, champ and Conhi both now have some modicum of support for declarative device management, um, and are using that status channel and using device declarations. Um, and, you know, we’ll have links to those ring, you know, relative, uh, feature comparisons out there. Um, as we put those in the show notes, um, there’s a lot to, like in declarative. I think that the declarative model, um, you know, is definitely the future of where you want your devices to go. So, um, you know, I was gonna say, it’s certainly something that, you know, uh, if your MDM doesn’t have it today, they better be working on it.

Marcus Ransom (00:50:03):
It’s al it’s also interesting to see that this is being the, the, the functionality is being trickle fed by, by Apple. So there were, there was a lot of excitement about Ventura, declarative MDMs coming to Mac Os, so we can do all of this stuff. And the reality is, well, not yet. Um, and I’m also really happy about that approach cuz you know, we’ve all been in scenarios where a huge change changing everything happens in one hit and software is hard, and it doesn’t always work the way the person writing the software expected it to work. And so to, to be able to troubleshoot and wrap our heads around the change in a very small and incremental way, um, for me offsets the frustration of not being able to solve all of these other problems I’m hoping we’re gonna be able to solve in the future. So, um, I’m excited, but also relieved that we are not having to have spent this last part of the year troubleshooting 800 different declarity of channel problems. Um mm-hmm.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:51:11):
. Yeah. But, you know, uh, I never wanna talk to in the weeds around stuff, but I do know that vendors, not just Jamf, but all MDM vendors have spent a lot of time filing feedback and, and trying to help Apple refine status channel what triggers the device to actually attest at state to a server and all. There’s so much of that stuff hap still going on. Yeah. Now mm-hmm. , uh, as it’s, as it’s being leveraged more and more, uh, o on more operating systems and more devices that are talking to servers. And on the flip side, how do we prepare service for the amount of additional communication that might be happening from more and more devices that are supporting it? So there’s, there’s a lot, there’s a lot to it that maybe you don’t think about.

Marcus Ransom (00:51:59):
MDMs, this kind changed, but this very chatty, isn’t it?

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:52:01):
Yes.

Marcus Ransom (00:52:02):
Yes. The, the, the idea that MDM was just U D p, it was sending out all of these commands and the device was just responding to it. Well now it’s, now MDM started talking back and we all know what it’s like when something you’re responsible for managing starts talking back. Um,

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:52:19):
Oh, once the toddler starts learning how to talk to you, , life changes. You just wait and change it.

Marcus Ransom (00:52:27):
Teenagers just wait until you get teenagers.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:52:29):
Oh boy. I mean, three going on 13 already over here. Uh, yeah. Oh, here comes the kitty again.

Marcus Ransom (00:52:36):
Yeah. Speaking about things that talk back, gotta, yeah.

Tom Bridge (00:52:41):
I was gonna say macro is at least asleep next to me, so I, you know, at least he has decided to go down for a nap. He was yelling at me a little bit ago.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:52:48):
I’ve seen the back door unlock quite a few times. So I imagine the puppy is now awake and is going in and out of the door frequently.

Tom Bridge (00:52:55):
. Yes. Well, so in addition to divide declarative and login items, we also got the deprecation of the system preferences policy, mostly because Apple deprecated system preferences with macros Ventura and welcome to the new age of system settings.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:53:11):
Hey, at least we can resize the window now, that part of the

Tom Bridge (00:53:14):
Window anyway. Oh yeah, that is, that’s true. I was gonna say, I’ll take it of, of all of the Apple applications that they have produced over the years, this is definitely one of them. Um, you know, it, it’s kind of a love loathe relationship for me right now. I mean, I, we’ve gotten a lot of customer feedback that, hey, I wanna be able to restrict things. And we’re like, well, you can kind of do that with the system preferences policy. It kind of, sort of works that way. Please go file feedback at feedback assistant on apple.com and tell Apple how you feel, um, you know, and, and go to town from there. But there’s gonna be some areas of system settings that will always be available now, including one that, you know, one area that is, is spells trouble for organizations who don’t have access to automated device enrollment. And that is the profiles pain itself. And so if you’re just relying on device enrollment and the goodness of your users, well,

Marcus Ransom (00:54:11):
But the, the line that’s resonated for me is, so how would you approach this with iOS? Because it’s not something we can manage with iOS. Um, that’s great. And that mm-hmm. generally hasn’t been a problem. So, and I, I, I think the, the fears around Apple being an iOS only organization and removing Mac os, I think, you know, we’re, we’re seeing Mac OS is here to stay, but we are seeing some unification in the approach and unification in how we manage things and mm-hmm. , you know, I suppose trying to find, trying to find more robust ways of managing things than just hiding preference pains. Cuz I know that you could hide a preference payment, you could still search for the item that was in that hidden preference pain and get access to it, which is

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:55:07):
Yeah. Yeah. You know, the, the, the trade off there is, okay, so let’s say your organization now has more transparency into what is being managed or restricted or however you wanna talk about it on a device, well, then those organizations need to, on maybe a more granular level, have the ability to enforce those restrictions in ways that maybe they couldn’t before. Right. So, you know, you can, you can say, we turn on the software firewall and then we’re gonna hide all these preferences, so you can’t adjust it. Well, people are gonna find their way around that. And if they go in and they see a profile that you’re doing X thing, they’re gonna try to work around it if they think it’s a benefit to them. So maybe you start filing feedback around, well, why do I feel like my organization has to do X on my system? And can Apple give me a better way to manage that experience on the system that doesn’t involve me just hiding a bunch of stuff from my end users? And those are hard conversations to have and, and, and our, some organizations may not know how to have those conversations. Yeah.

Tom Bridge (00:56:07):
Well, I think that’s the hardest part right now is that so many organizations just aren’t equipped to have those conversations. Mm-hmm. like, Hey, we need to, you know, this is the, one of the places where, you know, friends of the pod collide have a really interesting approach to device management, even if I don’t always agree with, uh, how they handle M D M, for example. Um, you know, they’re very much focused on monitoring the device and in, and informing the user, um, and informing the user’s admins when circumstances arise. Mm-hmm. . Um, but I feel like that’s the right approach to take in a lot of these cases, um, because you’ve got an HR department for a reason,

Marcus Ransom (00:56:42):
And de detection is often a lot stronger than, than than blocking as well. So I know this is something Apple’s very focused on, a lot of messaging around this is if you just block, it’s easy to then just assume that because you’ve blocked a certain it, I’m like, we’ve restricted the profiles pain, so therefore nobody can get in there and modify anything. But we know there are ways around that to find out what’s in there. And if you’ve got access to the command line, there’s all sorts of things you can do to find, so just restricting something isn’t necessarily gonna provide the protection that you are hoping to get from that item. Whereas detection is so much more powerful where, you know, if, if you’ve got engineers, for example, are allowed to do SSH because they have a legitimate need to do that, um, but all of a sudden you are noticing s SSH access and someone in the finance team’s device, um, that you thought you had it blocked.

(00:57:37):
But, you know, there’s been a point release where that restriction no longer works or however it happens. But if you’ve got no detection in place, um, you didn’t, you don’t know the problems you have to deal with. Um, so yeah, apple may be forcing your hands in this way to say, you need to get better at managing your devices, or this restriction doesn’t actually do the thing you thought it did. Um, I loved Rich Trout’s presentation, I think it was at Maxus admin about showing how easy it is for a standard user to run applications that have not been installed on their systems. The idea of, oh, we don’t want people to be an admin because we don’t want them installing software. It’s like, well watch this , watch this. Here’s a really, really old version of V L C that they’re able to run mm-hmm. from. Yeah.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:58:33):
Yeah. And coming on the heels of some of those u sb restrictions on the, on macro os being deprecated, right. And relying on third parties and using system APIs to do it instead, instead of it being like built in, uh, all plays into that story, I think.

Marcus Ransom (00:58:49):
Yeah. Security’s been a really big focus of, of Apple this year as well, hasn’t it?

Tom Bridge (00:58:57):
Um, oh, for sure.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:58:58):
Mm-hmm. .

Tom Bridge (00:59:00):
And, you know, I think that that definitely shows as we get the final released version of pass keys, uh, in Iowa 16, in Makos 13, um, I’ve started using them a couple of different places as, uh, multi-factor tokens, um, or, you know, multi-factor, you know, equivalents. And, and I’ve yet to find anybody who’s really kind of embraced using it like full, full boar, um, as the primary credential. And if folks wanna point me towards those, um, I will happily patronize businesses that show me they care about, that’s kind of security.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (00:59:30):
Mm-hmm.

Marcus Ransom (00:59:31):
And I, I also think, you know, having opportunities to use them so I can really start wrapping my head around how they work, most importantly, how they don’t work, so that when they do start to become widespread, I’m already up to speed with things. So, you know, share in the Slack channel where there’s anything, any services or systems you’ve found that are using pass keys or any tricks you’ve got. So we’d, we’d love to share that with the community and, um, get everyone on board with this. A big shout out to Ricky Mandela, who’s been doing some

Tom Bridge (01:00:02):
Yes. Yes.

Marcus Ransom (01:00:03):
Amazing.

Tom Bridge (01:00:04):
Ricky’s amazing. Yeah. I love their Twitter.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:00:06):
They’re great. A great follow. If you’re still on the, the Tweety box, he’s,

Tom Bridge (01:00:11):
Yeah, I, I think they’re

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:00:12):
A great follow. I,

Tom Bridge (01:00:14):
I, I think they’re also on talk about this on site somewhere. Maybe I’m wrong. I will have to go and look at my own Mastodon. So Yeah, that, I mean, guess could talk about that at some

Marcus Ransom (01:00:23):
Point, gaming as well for, you know, more examples of awesomeness.

Tom Bridge (01:00:28):
Yes.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:00:29):
Mm-hmm. .

Tom Bridge (01:00:31):
Um, so that kind of takes us through, you know, most of the new features that are out there. Um, you know, in there, what was your, uh, what was your thought of the beta period? Um, what, how did you, how did this year’s beta period for, um, you know, for Macs Ventura go for you in iOS?

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:00:49):
I feel like I have to answer this because I’m the, the MAC admin on the call. . Yeah.

Tom Bridge (01:00:54):
Um, we’re still the Mac admin in my house, and, you know, I That’s fair. I I, I participated a lot of the, the testing of our own product here.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:01:02):
Um, that’s fair. So, uh, I, I realize I haven’t been on the pod in a while. Um, so I, I work at Jam. I, I’m, man, I manage now our client platform, engineering team who maintains the jam infrastructure we use for our own management internally at Jamf. Um, fortunately for us, we have some of the top minds and like Apple system ecosystem from our friends who work on Connect through Protect to folks like Mark Buffington, who we call Buff Tanika, just knows a little bit of everything, not a little bit, a lot of everything.

Marcus Ransom (01:01:36):
just knows everything or knows how to,

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:01:38):
Who are on board very early in beta cycles to test out things, provide feedback, give us feedback of our own infl implementation. And on the flip side, our own implementation being in a position where we are able to inform folks who are working on the product about how you would do this as a customer to help build out some product. Right? That’s kind of the, the two-way street of, of, of what our team does. Um, it just felt like a mad rush for managed login and background items the whole time. Really, how do we get this feedback fa we need to update to the new beta immediately so that we can validate that this is working the way that we expect. And if it doesn’t, we get that feedback in two days so that maybe in two betas it’ll be fixed . Like, it was a lot of that.

(01:02:22):
And, and we were, we’re very, we kind of have an ideal state of end users to do that kind of betal, cy beta cycle stuff at our organization. And we really try to take advantage of that. And I mean that in a loving way to get feedback to Apple early and often on things that we notice so that we make sure we’re giving them what they need so that organizations can use the new features successfully. Um, but it just felt like a mad rush for managed login and background items, the whole beta cycle for us.

Marcus Ransom (01:02:51):
I, I think it really illustrated, really illustrated this year with, with those examples, the idea during the beta period that you log feedback, a change is made, and then we receive a next version of the beta the next day. But getting people to wrap their head around code cut and the actual time it takes for feedback to be received, understood changes, formulated, tested, code written, and the code implemented into the pipeline. And that to then come out for testing, um, whether it be with a device management product or an operating system or applications, there’s a lot of moving pieces mm-hmm. , and it’s why, you know, people saying, oh, I’ll, I’ll jump on some of the later beaters and do my testing. Then it’s like, it’s too late. It’s too late. Then , um, test early test on day one. Provide feedback to get things into the pipeline.

(01:03:55):
And when MDM organizations or Max Maxis admins are relying on somebody else’s code to go through that code cut and pipeline, and then come out the other end for them to be able to test it and then implement their own code changes and review processes and come through to be able to hit the end users. Um, there are weeks, sometimes months, uh, of time in there mm-hmm. . Um, so, you know, the, the, the sooner we all all jump on this, the better. But, um, so mm-hmm. , you know, I know the answer to this, Emily, but what, what day did you release support for Ventura at Jamf?

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:04:35):
Um, I mean, technically we started supporting it in the beta .

Marcus Ransom (01:04:38):
Exactly. Yeah.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:04:39):
But , yep. Um, we, we did our best. Yep. Um, um, we are a small, my team’s pretty small. It’s, it’s myself and two engineers. Um, our primary jam pro engineer is not me, it’s my engineer Daniella. Um, she was largely responsible for a bunch of other implementations we are working on during this period, including some security and compliance project. So, uh, that stuff was kind of on me. And I’m a manager now. I have about 20 perc 25% of my time, if I’m lucky each week to do engineering. So it was, it was a lot. But yeah, we, we tried ver I could probably go back through the changes on some of, of our profiles and deployments and even go through our Slack channels and see when I was saying, okay, new profile going out to this group. But, you know, as soon as WW d c wrapped, we knew new operating systems were coming. We had a fall readiness channel in Slack. And I said, Hey, I know you’re gonna go out and upgrade your production Mac, even though we would recommend you not. Yeah. , I want your feedback anyway. Please join us in this channel, you know, and try to try to funnel it somewhere where we can use it to our advantage to be prepared.

Marcus Ransom (01:05:47):
This is the first time I’ve, I’ve just realized then, thinking about this, this is the first time in, well, this is actually the first time ever that my work Mac has been managed by somebody who’s not me. Um,

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:06:04):
, God, , I’m so sorry.

Marcus Ransom (01:06:06):
No. And the communication as well as the technical and engineering work that happened in that beta process. The communication. So their internal Slack channels where people were providing their feedback, letting people know, Hey, if you wanna jump on the beaters early, um, you know, be careful, uh, understand the, the risks, but here’s how you can do it and here’s what our recommendations are and provide us feedback and let you know, let us know what’s happening. And that not just externally with Appleseed for it, but internally with organizations, um, developers are a perfect example of this, where the developer stack is often very, very complicated. And the admin doesn’t always have insight into everything that the developers are doing and how they need to do things. But involving them in that beta process and getting their feedback, getting them to test all of these complex workflows they have that are utterly critical to what they’re doing, and those sorts of things are the key to being able to support Ventura unofficially before release, but officially on, on day one as soon as it’s released. Yes. Have at it. Um, yeah.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:07:16):
Mm-hmm. and I actually think for, is the MO more impressive? I, I think, you know, pre zero day support of an operating system is kind of a big deal, right? But like beyond that, what’s been impressive for us is, has been the adoption. Um, we haven’t really had a formalized OS requirement internally. We operated on good faith that a lot of people here do upgrade early and often, and they do, but not everybody. Um, we rolled out Nudge internally this year to help us with security and compliance around OS versioning. Uh, after that two week window, I think we ended up with about 60% of our fleet upgrading to Ventura and the other 30 40% staying on Monterey, but patching to the latest version of Monterey, which was pretty, I mean, I know SAP’s fleet’s bigger than ours, but I think our adoption rate was pretty impressive. Even if our pie chart isn’t for tens of thousands of devices, it’s still pretty good. Still pretty good. I was pretty

Marcus Ransom (01:08:24):
Proud. Eric Gomez is no longer technically a Mac admin, but the legacy of Nudge, um, oh globally has been phenomenal. I know talking to customers where I, I think this is the best feedback for Nudge you could possibly get where they said, oh, is there a way we can update patch machines that are turned off in cupboards? Cuz they’re the only ones we’ve got now that aren’t updated. It’s like, well, I, I, I think if someone’s gonna need to go and find those machines, if they’re off, they’re off, but,

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:08:54):
Right. Mm-hmm.

Marcus Ransom (01:08:55):
, if that’s, if that’s now the problem you’re trying to solve, rather than the outliers out there that will just try and circumvent every process, that’s a pretty good place to be in, in terms of keeping your fleet secure and up to date.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:09:10):
Mm-hmm. .

Tom Bridge (01:09:12):
Yeah. And, you know, major props to Eric for, for, for, for everything that Nudge represents and for all of the people who are still contributing to that. I know Bart Rudins got some commits there now. Um, and he’s obviously done an incredible amount of work on dialogue, uh, SWIFT dialogue mm-hmm. , um, you know, to do the same, same kinds of things to do the same kind of notifications that Macin men’s need. So, you know, it’s exciting to kind of see those things, you know, happen and be part of those worlds. Um, so yeah, I would say that, you know, the arrival for me, the beta period was mostly pretty smooth. We had a couple of hiccups around a couple of things in the MDM spec that weren’t quite right in, uh, in Ventura, but they got fixed before production. So, uh, or at least before 1301. Um, which is really all I can ask.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:10:00):
Yeah. I do recall, and I don’t wanna speak out a turn about things that I’m, I don’t work on because I do not work on Jampro as a product. I use Jampro as a customer, just happened to work for Jamf as a company. Um, I do know there was a lot of work that happened around declarative on Ventura in particular, and what type of actions happening in the user space would trigger the device to attest to the server certain states and different channels and just lots of engineering cycles and pulling of hair and, and gnawing of teeth, getting some of that stuff sorted out and working with Apple on it. I remember there being a lot going on with that cuz you know, you wanna get it right and you wanna help Apple get it right. Cuz if it’s the future and, and we’re, you know, vendors, we wanna help lead the way to help our customer, our mutual customers, right? We wanna get that. We wanna talk to Apple early about what we’re seeing and how to make it better. Give ’em the feedback that they’re looking for. Um, I remember a lot of that. Um,

Marcus Ransom (01:11:01):
And I think ultimately that all trickles down to all we all want is for our users to have a good experience and to be able to get on with what they’re doing and not have to worry about all of these other things that we, we should be able to automate and wanting to know how to automate it and be able to do it in a seamless way. And, and I think that’s what a lot of these community tools and device management vendor supplied tools are, are ultimately just trying to do. Um, we, we can use a lot of different language around describing them, but that that’s, that’s all we want to do is to let people do what they need to do on these devices.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:11:45):
Mm-hmm. .

Tom Bridge (01:11:48):
So lots of positive movement there. And I think that, you know, we did have a little bit of a snafu with the over the air updates, um, that happened at the, at the very end there.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:11:57):
What, what was that already? It was that like you couldn’t defer it unless it was on a certain version of a previous,

Tom Bridge (01:12:03):
Correct. Yeah. So if you were on 1261 and later you could use the major deferral to, uh, defer a, uh, macros update. Uh, so the Ventura would not be offered to those systems as an over the air up today update. Um, if or so I, I take that back cuz I always need to go back to the, the, the, the flow chart that got constructed out of all of this, which was essentially

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:12:25):
Oh yeah.

Tom Bridge (01:12:26):
, if the operating system was 12.3 to 12.6, you had to defer minor updates. If you wanted Ventura to be blocked, you could defer major updates if you wanted Ventura to be blocked on 1261 and later. But there were also a period of time during which over the air updates would not be delivered to MDM enrolled machines at all. And that period was up, uh, uh, beginning with macros 13.1, which was released a couple weeks ago.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:12:58):
God, my brain checked out when you said flowchart. I can’t believe we had the crux chart to understand.

Marcus Ransom (01:13:03):
So the was Yeah. Apple released the major upgrade is being able to be a, using software updates. So the same mechanism, we get minor updates and so some sort of disconnect between the way you defer and manage and the way they’re implemented that the, the new major upgrades through software update were not being deferred by the mechanism that was put in place to defer the store.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:13:32):
Yeah. This wast the whole idea that Apple was really trying to make updates just faster. Yes. Everybody

Tom Bridge (01:13:39):
Faster and smaller. And those are both laudable goals. Um, and you know, I think that any, uh, any end user who wants a, you know, a good experience on major version upgrade is asking for the update to be smaller than 12 gigs. Yep. Um, and they’re asking for that to be faster than 40 minutes. Mm-hmm. and this technology does both of those things adequately well when it respects the, uh, MDM configuration of the device. Yeah. Mm-hmm. . And you know, what I think is interesting is that now for the very first time, um, coming in January, the end of January on January 22nd, any new update to the operating system after January 22nd is gonna be offered as an OTA update, which does not require admin permissions to any user of macros 20

Marcus Ransom (01:14:27):
And cannot be deferred that the deferred

Tom Bridge (01:14:29):
And cannot be deferred or blocked.

Marcus Ransom (01:14:32):
So there are areas we, you know, we all up updating and upgrading your operating system. Apple now has language in their documentation, which talks about, there may be architectural reasons that we are not able to implement all security fixes in older versions of Mac os. Um, so that’s why it’s great to be able to be running the latest version of Mac os. But there are areas, I’m thinking my background, university labs where you have to wait until the end of the year a term mm-hmm. before you put in changes because academics have their coursework, um, written for that version of the operating system, that version of the software. Now a new version of MAC OS may require a new version of the applications, which may completely change their course they’re trying to teach. Uh, you don’t want to upgrade an operating system during someone’s major assessment where they’re putting something together.

(01:15:33):
So anybody who’s managing lab fleets needs to now be very conscious of the fact that any non-ad admin user, um, can upgrade that machine. Uh, so you need to find other ways of deferring that. So, you know, interesting to hear from the listeners what sort of methods they’ve been finding to be able to, uh, lock those devices down. And I, I get it why Apple is not providing a mechanism longer than 90 days, because we all know there will be people that will use that for ways which it was not intended and use that to mm-hmm. , you know, have, you know, the equivalent the, the Mac equivalent of having, you know, an organization still running Windows XP and everything that entails. And we don’t want to be managing those kind of fleets. But, um, much like the background login items, um, transparency around what we’re administering on devices, there are edge cases where you really need to be able to do things in a very specific way.

Tom Bridge (01:16:39):
Mm-hmm. . Yeah. I definitely will admit some concern about the fact that there was no other way to do this this time. Um, and you know, I’m certainly gonna hear it from customers on their calls is that, you know, hey, I I really want to keep my machines running in lockstep and I wanna stay on 12 as long as I can mm-hmm. , or I wanna stay on 11 for a little bit longer. Um, cuz I either have old applications that I need to support or things like that, and I have to go put on my happy product manager hat and, and make excuses or try and convince them of, of, hey, yeah, you really need to be up on the latest version of the operating system for security reasons.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:17:16):
I am, it’s

Tom Bridge (01:17:17):
Hard.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:17:18):
So blessed hashtag blessed to be one of those customers that’s like, just get it out the door right now, update all of my things for me. I don’t wanna have to touch ’em, just go do it. I don’t care. I want everybody on the latest all the time. Yep. And that I work at an organization where we can float that mostly. Yep. Even here, we still have some exceptions, you know? Um, but yeah, it’s tough, especially, yeah. My, my IT career started in computer labs at universities too. You sometimes had to stay 2, 3, 4 versions of operating systems behind for some proprietary music notation software on a version that works with a certain mini plugin for keyboards that you have in your labs to continue to function. You know, like I remember that. I imagine there are still people out there that have to float that kind of stuff. That’s tough. That’s really tough.

Marcus Ransom (01:18:04):
As soon as you hear the word avid, you know that’s gonna be a problem.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:18:09):
Oh

Marcus Ransom (01:18:09):
Man. So I I I should’ve been managing trigger warning before,

Tom Bridge (01:18:12):
So Yeah. Want to beep that too?

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:18:14):
Yeah. . Well, we’ve been talking about that a lot. We should probably move on very quickly to some of our other notes and, and try

Tom Bridge (01:18:23):
To, before we do that, I do have a quick message from our friends at Mosel. Deploying, managing and protecting Apple devices at work shouldn’t be difficult to require several solutions. Mosel is the only Apple unified platform for business By combining enhanced device management en void security, internet privacy and security, uh, single sign on and enhanced apps management into a single apple only platform. Businesses can now easily and automatically deploy, manage, and protect their Apple devices automatically with one solution end at an affordable price with a solution for every business size and the best support in the market. Request your free account today and see why firsthand mo uh, see firsthand why mosell is more than an Apple mdm. Mosell is everything you need to work with Apple To learn more, visit business.mosul.com. That’s business dot moss y l e.com. And thanks too mu so much to our wonderful friends at Mosel for sponsoring this podcast. So we also got some extra hardware this year. We got some new machines. What did you guys make of the brand new MacBook errors?

Marcus Ransom (01:19:28):
They’re blue.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:19:29):
They are, yeah. . Uh, I like the new body framing, the kind of Yeah. Rounded square. Yep. Flat. Not the, I feel like we’re in the 2020s now. Mm-hmm. , which is cool on the MacBook Air. It felt like it was long overdue. Yes. I can’t believe on that pro they kept the touch mark thing. What

Tom Bridge (01:19:54):
The hell? . I mean, honestly, I don’t understand the MacBook. Uh, pro M two, I just don’t care.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:20:00):
, it’s just boggles the mind. I mean, I, whatever

Marcus Ransom (01:20:04):
The, the thing, the thing that I love about the M two MacBook Air is looking at the specks of it and the performance of it. It’s like for, for most users, that’s an awesome machine. That’s

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:20:16):
Oh

Marcus Ransom (01:20:16):
Yeah. The once, probably, probably the only real limitation I can see is the single supported external display display, um mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm . You can get around that with Display link, um, which is great, but it’s not necessarily elegant. Um, but in terms of performance for, for an everyday user or even, you know, someone that’s wanting to push that device reasonable amounts, they’re more than capable. And I think that, you know, seeing where Apple silicon has gone to the, like the last, the last i three Intel MacBook Air was in, which came just around the time of lockdown where everybody discovered the need for video conferencing. That was a piece of junk, I’m sorry Apple. It was just not usable. And anybody who purchased a bunch of those to try and get them through, everybody working remotely, instantly regretted that decision. And then seeing the MacBook Air, the entry level MacBook Air going from being the pariah of the lineup to being freaking awesome is, is a great sign. Um, and beautiful as well. So, you know, seeing them available in colors, having the really nice enclosure on them so that people who are being given that as their new device aren’t going, oh, oh, I wish I had the other one. It’s like,

Tom Bridge (01:21:37):
Yeah,

Marcus Ransom (01:21:38):
I’m gonna give this a name and I’m gonna love this and I’m gonna put stickers on it and

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:21:43):
The stickers are going right on the top. No case. That’s how dedicated I am to this device. Yeah. Yes.

Tom Bridge (01:21:50):
I was gonna say,

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:21:51):
Oh good. You got those in the mail.

Tom Bridge (01:21:52):
Thank you very much. Um, I am very excited, you know, for Apple to, to discover that corporate, that business users and people also like color. Um, one day that will happen and that will be my happiest day. We did get a midnight blue MacBook Air this time. Um, you know, in addition to Silver Space, gray and Dishwater, I mean Star Life , um,

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:22:13):
Bring back pink.

Tom Bridge (01:22:15):
I mean, honestly,

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:22:15):
Bring back my rose gold colors. Give

Tom Bridge (01:22:17):
Me some colors. I want colors. I mean, that’s probably the only reason I I don’t have a, you know, a brand new MacBook too, uh, air is that I was like,

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:22:27):
The homies colors at the Home Depot need orange MacBook heirs. Yeah. Come on Apple, let’s get it together.

Marcus Ransom (01:22:35):
Make Pat happy. Yeah. I’d, I’d love to see a breakdown of what the, what the actual, um, breakdown of color deliveries are for the iMac. I know Apple would never provide that kind of information, but

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:22:52):
That orange is just so, like I’ve got, I’m good. I’ve gotta pray that it’s the orange Isn’t is the leader there? Yeah. Because it’s beautiful. Yeah. It’s such a great color. Ugh. Maybe that’s my former Home Depot. Uh, UT Austin alumni speaking, but the orange is really nice . It is. That would be interesting. Yep.

Marcus Ransom (01:23:14):
So the hard, the hardware lineup’s pretty, pretty awesome now, isn’t it? So we’ve really only got the Mac Pro is the only Intel device available.

Tom Bridge (01:23:23):
Don’t forget the Mac Minis still you can buy that in the Intel, uh, version of that. Still.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:23:29):
You can somehow,

Tom Bridge (01:23:30):
So somehow there are still Intel Mac Minis running around

Marcus Ransom (01:23:33):
Out there. I don’t sheet code and the store, you’ve gotta enter to

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:23:37):
Some state university. Your government entity somewhere was like, no, we have to have Mac Minis with Intels and Apple’s just still selling them for some reason. Like, oh,

Marcus Ransom (01:23:48):
Oh, apple needs them for something. So they’re like, well, we might as well make them available for somebody else.

Tom Bridge (01:23:52):
Well, and honestly I’d forgotten if this year has been so long. This was the year that we got the Mac studio.

Marcus Ransom (01:24:00):
I was just at back. I the same thing. Oh my

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:24:02):
Gosh. Yes. The studio

Marcus Ransom (01:24:03):
Max and the studio.

Tom Bridge (01:24:05):
Well, yes, and the studio Max. And so, you know, the and the new display that I’m talking to you on now, I I is the other thing that we, did we get that this year? Or did we get that last year? The new Apple Studio Display. I’m gonna have to open up my Trust MAC Tracker application. Oh yeah. Let it tell me I love that app

Marcus Ransom (01:24:24):
In the chat, Scott, like telling us maybe AWS is the reason that we’re still able to get the Intel Mac Minis. That could, could be, could be. Right. Oh, so you know that

Tom Bridge (01:24:33):
That’s a good thought

Marcus Ransom (01:24:35):
There. Your Mac isn’t necessarily, your Mac may be one that you just rent by the day.

Tom Bridge (01:24:41):
Well, yeah, I mean if we look the, the Mac Studio, yeah. March, 2022 and later is when we got the Mac Studio. So that also brought with us the M one Ultra, um, which is really just two M one max is jammed together with a nice, uh, buffer interchange, um, a nice fast b uh, buffer interchange there. So that is, you know, one of the other things that we get there

Marcus Ransom (01:25:02):
And the performance of that rivals the Intel MAC Pro. Um, when you fill that up, it can do a lot in a very small form factor, um, most of which is fan . Um, which, which is not sur not surprising, but, um, which sort of shows us just how hard you need to push Apple silicon before you need a big ass fan cooling it down. Um, so, you know, the, the hardware leaps and bounds are really exciting to see, you know, seeing production teams like video production teams just start ordering ultras, um, and going, yep, we’ll just have 20 of these, these are gonna be great. Um, we can fit more displays on the table now that we don’t have to have a tower on there as well.

Tom Bridge (01:25:57):
Well, and I think the tower’s gonna be the big question, right? Like, does Apple allow for third party graphics cards? Does Apple allow for third party storage? How do they, you know, maintain those kind of things. I’m really interested to see what happens there, because I’m skeptical as to whether or not you really could make a Mac Pro and not have it be expandable. Yeah. Um, and that seems to be antithetical to a lot of the unified memory architecture work that Apple’s done on the M one s and the M two s. Um, can you

Marcus Ransom (01:26:29):
Actually benefit from them being external third party devices? Or is the benefit of the in is the performance expectations of those not what you, not what the end user was hoping to get out of them because of the new architecture? You know, we are, we back to the 2013 Mac Pro where everything’s done via Thunderbolt. There’s, there’s a lot of conjecture at the moment that, um, that the Mac Pro has been put off, um, while Apple deals with trying to diversify its hardware manufacturing and not be reliant on

Tom Bridge (01:27:03):
Me. Well, and let’s just be real for a second. Uh, supply lines have been mess. I mean, a full on mess,

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:27:11):
Just a disaster.

Tom Bridge (01:27:13):
So, you know, I mean, I can understand wanting to give that a little time to breathe and make sure that you’ve got everything you need and taken care of. Especially, you know, we’ve seen a lot of movements this year. I mean, TSMC is, is broken ground on a new processor plant in the United States. Apple has said that some of their products are gonna be made there, uh, or some of their chips are gonna be made there, which means, hey, is there gonna be an Apple assembly facility here in the States? Cuz it sure as hell doesn’t make sense for them to make those processors in Arizona, ship them to someplace else on the other side of the world, build the machines mm-hmm. and ship them back again. That does not make a lot of sense. Mm-hmm. . So is there a hope for that, that you could buy, you know, an Apple product, you know, not just designed in California, but perhaps assembled there too, or designed in California, assembled in Arizona, or something along those lines?

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:28:03):
Texas

Tom Bridge (01:28:04):
. Oh, I guess that’s another state. I forget about Texas a lot. I try really hard to do

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:28:10):
That. Apple has like two giant corporate locations in Austin, Texas. That is true. So you never

Tom Bridge (01:28:16):
Know. That’s true.

Marcus Ransom (01:28:17):
You know, or are they gonna go back to manufacturing? Manufacturing in Cork? Maybe Jared. Oh, Alan will be able to get back on the, the hardware production facilities and start making us all of these amazing Mac Pros.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:28:31):
I’m sure he’s eager to do

Marcus Ransom (01:28:32):
That. I’m, I’m sure he is. It’s absolutely would he be keen to be doing, but, um, yeah, it’s, but what about the phones? What was the hardware like, um, in the phones? I know we’ve spoken about the cameras, but I

Tom Bridge (01:28:46):
I Oh yeah. The cameras. Well, I was gonna say, I have a very fancy new, you know, iPhone 16 pro here, um, that I really love. The battery life is substantially better. And we got the dynamic island, which is, I mean, I’ve said this before, elsewhere, I’ll say it again here. The dynamic island is Apple’s best design effort, period. Full stop. In the last 15 years. Um, the, the work that they have done in, in turning the little, you know, the, the, the little tiny oval here into something that is functional, that is part of your experience of using the device and not making it, you know, like the, because here was all the, the, we got the notch with the iPhone 10. Yeah. And we had to live with the notch for a long time. And it was living with the notch, not embracing it. And I feel like Apple has decided, okay, this dynamic island thing, this is a motif that we can use. This is a space that where we can, you know, animate it. That, that it can have some functionality that things can grow out of it, that things can reshape out of it. It’s really, really clever integral design work that took a lot of detail-oriented behaviors and it made them into coherent hole. And I’ve missed that part of Apple.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:30:04):
Yeah. We just need more third party apps to get on board with the APIs for the dynamic island and start really leveraging it. Like there’s some already doing some compelling things. I know MLBs usually ahead of the curve on some of the stuff on their mobile apps, which is cool. Like the native apps in particular music mm-hmm. , you can, you can actually like hard press and, and interact with it. Like it’s a controller for music that’s playing and Apple TV remote and all sorts of stuff like that. So when that starts expanding out into third party apps, I think it’ll start getting very, very cool. Yeah.

Tom Bridge (01:30:38):
Um, I’m excited to see more people do more things with it. It’s already tied in, so I’d like overcast for podcasts, for example, uses it. Um, you get the, you get the art that’s associated with the podcast. A little tiny bubble. Mm-hmm. , which is great. Um, I, I also have really appreciated live updates that are of now available on the always on lock screen. My, my, my phone is always on this, this lock screen. So you, you can see I’ve, I’ve got a, you know, some, some I notifiers and some other things along those lines. Um, I’m really stoked to see what they do with that. I think there’s a lot of potential there.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:31:12):
I’m, I’m, I’m still finding myself a little frustrated on the, and this is an OS level thing I guess, but the focus mode custom wallpaper mm-hmm. dot lock screen situation. It’s so,

Tom Bridge (01:31:25):
It’s a mess

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:31:25):
For, for someone that’s not us who’s like, I’m gonna press hold on this random spot and see what happens all the time. Like what consumers are using some of that. And, and I also found recently, I was like, I should make a custom focus mode just for Isabel, my daughter, for when she’s on the iPad. When you make a custom mode, you can’t set custom wallpaper and lock screen. You can only use ones created for other modes that you’ve already built. So it’s like, they’re so close, but not quite there yet. It’s cool though. Like, it’s cool to have, um, you know, for, for JF we’ve, we’ve really gone all in on B Y O. We have a lot of people that use their own phones and use account driven user enrollment, the new user enrollment with managed Apple IDs to enroll their phones, to have like a work partition and a personal partition. And with the new focus mode stuff you can really be like, during these hours, here’s work mode, right? And I see all my work apps and I see, uh, self-service and I see all this worky stuff and all my widgets and then five 15 hits, boom, personal mode, don’t see the work stuff anymore. It’s like your phone transforms into a personal one. Like some of the directions that stuff is going. Super cool. Yeah.

Tom Bridge (01:32:33):
Super cool stuff. I’m super excited for that. And you know, I think that for me right now, I’m struggling with some of the, I I I I, I can’t remember where I, it asked me at one point, it was like, Hey, do you want me to automatically switch between personal and work modes? And I have not liked that. Um, it does not do that effectively reading my calendars. Um, yeah, I end up in personal mode during the middle of the work day, and then I don’t get personal or, or I don’t get work alerts. It’s weird.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:33:01):
Mine really struggles with fitness mode. Like, I’m like, oh, if I’m using the app for my gym, flip to fitness mode, but then it doesn’t always know how to flip back. And then if I’m using the app on my watch, depending on what version of iOS I’m on, the watch will pick up that the app is running and flip me the mode. But sometimes it doesn’t. And it’s, there’s some refinements come, I would hope coming,

Marcus Ransom (01:33:23):
Some experie making, making experience more discoverable as well. Like finding a way to simplify the setup where if you are, like a lot of these things, if you are setting up a phone for the first time and it’s a brand new phone, installing everything, it’s pretty straightforward to set that up. But when, like, my, my phone is still on its original iPhone 3G setup that has just migrated from phone to phone to phone to phone and huwi, there’s some tech debt in there. There’s

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:33:55):

Marcus Ransom (01:33:56):
Over like decade and a half of poor choices that are still on there. And, you know, so finding, you know, clean up my phone or something like that would be great. But an easy way to provide an output of what your configurations are, you know, to be able to print something out onto a screen. Like a, a bit like we used to be able to manage the home screen by plugging in your phone and doing that in iTunes mm-hmm. on a big screen mm-hmm. . So you could go and modify, you know, all of your various home screens and, and app pages and just having a way that you could actually plug your device in and actually go into, you know, full on config mode and be able to identify and go, okay, so which applications are identified as being work, which applications are being identified as being, you know, what are the notifications going to look like?

(01:34:52):
And being able to see that in a large screen rather than being able to fit all of that, that into, um, into an iPhone screen or, or anything like that. So, you know, I I I, I feel like that would make it a lot easier to actually eliminate all of the false positives of false negatives that we are getting. If you could actually get a way of identifying how it was configured and what sort of choices it was making. But that’s what I’d do if I worked at Apple. But I don’t, and there’s probably a really good reason that I don’t work at Apple because I’d be focusing on stuff like that rather than fixing stuff that really needs to be done. Like softer update

Tom Bridge (01:35:28):
,

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:35:31):
No one wants to do that.

Tom Bridge (01:35:32):
No one wants someone out there must,

Marcus Ransom (01:35:35):
Well, I haven’t seen AD again. So Yeah. Hopefully that position’s been filled by, um, an incredibly talented engineer and in 18 months to two years we’ll start to see the benefits of that coming through.

Tom Bridge (01:35:52):
Help me OB one Kenobi. You my only hope. Like, I mean that’s, that’s 100% every Mac and men right

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:35:58):
Now Apple, when you find that right person, you back up that dump truck to their house. Yes. You dump all that cash right on their front lawn. Yep. You do it. Hundred

Marcus Ransom (01:36:07):
No questions. So I don’t leave.

Tom Bridge (01:36:09):
Yes. Plenty of, uh, whatever you what whatever needs to be done.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:36:14):
Whatever. I mean, just, just make it happen. I

Tom Bridge (01:36:16):
Mean, I was gonna say, I, the number of times I have talked to in vain about software update this year, I think that the talk that I’m writing for the con conferences that are coming up this summer has to of course be about what is software update? How do software updates work on macro os how do they not work on macro os how are they different for MDMs? How are they all of those things. It’s been a very rich, you know, area of the discipline to study and talk about. It is just painful to see it be so painful.

Marcus Ransom (01:36:45):
And if we as Mac admins find that challenging and confusing, I, I know it’s something I’ve had to do in my role when you’re, when you’re talking to people who aren’t as immersed into the Apple ecosystem and have an expectation, which is not unreasonable of it just working, um mm-hmm. and then seeing the complex workarounds we have to go through to get it to just work and be an elegant end user experience is, is a little bit confronting. So maybe that brings us to what are you hoping for in 2023? So Tom, are you hoping to no longer have to do those talks about software update in 2023?

Tom Bridge (01:37:26):
I would like it to get easier. I mean that, honestly, I think that this is the year that Apple fix a software update. They made a huge effort this year and I’m, I was, uh, I, it was so frustrating to me to see the error to, to, to see all of the work. They did get thrown under the bus a little bit by a mistake around the M D M protocol, um, that they made. Because making updates faster and easier to install for all user types is a net positive for Mac admins everywhere. Maybe not if you’re managing a set of Avid law, you know things, but they’re, you, you’ve got a different world my friend, and you need to learn how to manage it on your own. Um, and Apple’s not gonna help you. So, uh, or they’re only, I

Marcus Ransom (01:38:09):
Mean, I think people who, I think people who manage those kind of systems know that as well. I, I dunno, that’s new experience for them, but for people who just want everything to be updated by Friday, um mm-hmm. .

Tom Bridge (01:38:25):
Yep. And who will, you know, adjust to whatever they need to adjust to. If it’s not, if it doesn’t work. And you know, those people are out there too. And I trust in their ability to, you know, to cope with that because it’s, it, it’s risks everywhere. Like the, the the art of it is, is the, is not stepping on every rake in the yard on your way through the, through the opera, through, you know, out to the mailbox and back. And

Marcus Ransom (01:38:50):
That’s what the beta period is for just running at those rakes and jumping up and down on them.

Tom Bridge (01:38:55):
Exactly. And so run at the rakes when you can provide feedback where you can provide justification for why you did, why you do something the way that you do it. And, you know, see if you get back some responses, and I think that the answer is you will. So, you know, I mean, I I I think that this is the year that Apple’s gonna fix software update. Um, please play this clip a year from now when I’m wrong. Um, but I have to believe that this is a high enough priority for Apple that they will work to resolve that issue.

Marcus Ransom (01:39:27):
So as somebody who still does this for a living, Emily, what are you hoping we’re gonna see, um, for from software for, from Apple? What are the missing pieces you hope get filled in?

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:39:39):
I, this is going to be such a tell, I’m showing my hand of what’s coming in my job for the next year, which should be of no surprise to anyone. I wish that the operating system out of the bat, and maybe this is something that needs to go onto the vendors, had better, um, builtin mechanisms for applying security and compliance requirements. Yeah. For things like, uh, Fedra Tax Ramp, state Ramp, UK Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus, um, I wish I remembered Australia’s, there’s, it’s something nine, right? Eight.

Marcus Ransom (01:40:17):
Thanks.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:40:17):
Sorry, I was

Marcus Ransom (01:40:18):
Off by what essential, the essential eight is

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:40:21):
What we mm-hmm. , the essential eight. Um, that, uh, maybe the operating system starts at that level when it is in an Apple Business manager instance, institutional, and then the organization can alleviate some of their requirements rather than having to layer things on. You’re just kind of opening things up. I, I don’t know what the right answer is there. And I’m not a security minded person. I admittedly, I just know what my team and my organization is, is finding itself needing. Uh, and it’s, and thank God for the amazing people that work on the MAC OS security compliance project. Oh, yes. Thank you so much to the people, including dear friend of ours, Alan Goldberg and the groups at JF who created the JF compliance editor and made that open source and available. You can get it@trustedgf.com. I’ll put a link in if you, you want that, um, for helping make it easier for admins to generate, determine, and apply what they need to, to adhere to compliance requirements at the organizations. But I, I like ki I, I don’t, I don’t know if you wanna backwards it, but there’s gotta be some middle ground to make this easier to harden the operating system in ways that help organizations succeed with the platform.

Marcus Ransom (01:41:39):
One, one of the confronting things when you’re looking at things like, you know, implementing, um, NIST or c i s benchmarks, and also thank you to those organizations for engaging directly with the macro security compliance project. Cause it’s only when we’re talking directly to each other that we can get things working the way they are. But when you have a look at some of the scripts that are required to enforce some of these very important security, um, features, functionality, uh, hardening controls, wouldn’t it be so much nicer if we could do it with a configuration profile? Um, or if there were published ways using, using the endpoint security framework, using the APIs that Apple is working on. So rather than us having to work out a yet another janky Python script to do something on a device that is not supported by Apple and unlikely to break or change in every point release, being able to have all of those items, even if they’re not automatically enforced an Apple business manager or anything like that.

(01:42:38):
But if they’re just documented in the configuration profile frameworks in the MDM framework to say, this is how you do this, and being configuration profiles, you can let someone be an admin user and they can’t turn it off. It’s just mm-hmm. enforced. So, you know, better, uh, apple embracing what it is we need to do and providing us with ways to do it. Um, application control, being able to have allow and denial list for applications, not just an application name, but application version, all sorts of things like that. You know, provide a framework so that vendors or the open source community can then leverage those frameworks to do what it is we need to do.

Tom Bridge (01:43:22):
Well, and I do want to call out, you know, the, the, the authors of the M S C P, um, including, you know, friends of the podcast, Bob Gendler, Alan Goldberg, Dan Broski, John Malman, Jason Blake, Blair Heiserman, Joshua Glensa, Elise Anderson, and Gary Ginske. I mean, so from nasa, nist, Leidos, champ, uh, you know, these are the people who are doing some really important work for compliance spaces on Makos and iOS and, or well, ma Makos primarily, I, I guess some of these profiles could be used for iOS. Maybe they’re working on an iOS version back in the background. Uh, one can hope. Um, but you know, you, the, the, those are the kind of things that, you know, uh, those are, those are some real heroes and they deserve all, all their accolades. Not to mention all the beer that we can buy them at conferences. Um, and or wings or, you know, uh, cyan wings, either whatever you, to Chicos Topo Chicos,

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:44:16):
Many hugs. If they’re huggers.

Tom Bridge (01:44:18):
If they’re huggers. Yes. Correct. I I I give a good hug. I’m just saying. So, but,

Marcus Ransom (01:44:23):
And, and I think an example of how, how important that work is on Apple’s website and their documentation, apple referencing the macros security compliance project, it’s unusual for Apple to reference community projects and guide people towards them. And I think that’s an example of how well regarded, um, and how important this project is that Apple is saying, this is the way, this is what you should be using if you need to do this. And, you know, and that’s, that’s come through a lot of hard work and not just hard work, but a, a really awesome approach to how this should be done.

Tom Bridge (01:45:03):
Absolutely. Mm-hmm. . So anything more that we want to get excited about for 2023?

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:45:09):
I mean, I have big ideas for my own company and what I’d love for them to do, but I’m gonna do what we tell everyone else to do and file feedback on what you wanna see.

Tom Bridge (01:45:19):
I will admit, I’ve spent a lot of this week reading feature requests, um, and, uh, you know, it’s fun to go into those, uh, into those buckets and take and take a look at it.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:45:28):
This is my first day looking at a, a, a monitor screen in about a week. So I have not been looking at feature requests . In fact, I’ve been staying as far away from my work Mac as possible.

Tom Bridge (01:45:44):
I’ve been looking at this screen most of all over the

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:45:47):
Last, he’s holding up a Nintendo Switch for people listening to the recording later.

Tom Bridge (01:45:50):
I have been, uh, I have been finally, uh, finally getting into, uh, old Nintendo games. Uh, I

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:45:57):
Finally got, I really wanted

Tom Bridge (01:45:57):
To do that Star Dude Valley kind of do event on that one. And I enjoy the fact that it is low, low and or no stakes. Um, yeah, it’s kind of, it’s kind of awesome.

Marcus Ransom (01:46:07):
Well, well next week for me is not, not gonna be looking at any kind of screen. I’m actually, well, apart from the one where I’m on YouTube trying to learn how to do brick laying, because I have a small garden wall that needs to be fixed of three bricks high and about 12 bricks wide, which no brick layer is gonna want to come and fix. It’s not structural. So it’s hopefully safe for me to do it myself. So that’s gonna be my

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:46:31):
Low stakes.

Marcus Ransom (01:46:31):
Yeah. That’s gonna be my first task of 2023 is to

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:46:37):
Sounds like become

Marcus Ransom (01:46:38):
The world’s worth

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:46:38):
Transition us into our bonus question to try to round things out for the day. Yeah. Sounds like Marcus’s first non-tech resolution for 2023 is to learn how to play bricks, . Exactly.

Marcus Ransom (01:46:53):
Laying the foundations for a good 2023 .

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:46:57):
There is

Marcus Ransom (01:46:58):
Jesus for setting, setting expectations for just how bad it’s going to be. Um, depending on just how bad it’s going to be. I may upload a photo, um, or I may just decide that no, nobody needs to see, see that. Yeah. I’m a better sales engineer than I am a brick layer. I think I can safely say I’m a better sales engineer than I’m a brick layer, and I may not actually be a very good sales engineer. So we’ll just , we’ll just leave it at that.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:47:24):
You’re the best. You’re

Tom Bridge (01:47:26):
Number one in my heart. Marcus

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:47:27):
. Mm,

Marcus Ransom (01:47:28):
Thank

Tom Bridge (01:47:29):
You. Uh, how about you, Emily? What, what’s your non-tech resolution for 2023?

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:47:33):
I don’t really believe in resolutions. I think I’m pretty good. All right. Uh, ,

Tom Bridge (01:47:38):
I mean, that’s a legitimate

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:47:40):
Approach. Um, I mean there, I always have goals or things that I wanna try to, uh, to, to work on. I guess. Like raising this poor puppy to be a good puppy citizen in the world is, is a goal. Mm-hmm. . Um, I also, my big goal is to figure out how to get our family to do more family things together. We feel a lot, maybe y’all can resonate with this, that my husband has his schedule. I have my schedule, our daughter has her schedule and, and it feels like we find ways to balance each other’s schedules to work with each other. But there isn’t that time where we’re all, we don’t have a family schedule where we have our things together and, and we’re already trying to start that. Like this morning we took Isabel to the movie theater for the first time. Nice movie going is a big thing in our family.

(01:48:33):
So we’re hoping that we can get her into going to see movies with us at the theater. So we go to the Alma Draft House, which is a theater chain based out of Austin, but they’re kind of all over now. They have kid friendly screenings with for three and up the lights are a little higher, the sound is a little lower. Talking’s. Okay. Cuz it’s kids, it’s trying to get them indoctrinated essentially into movie calling, which is what we’re working on. So Figur and doing a big road trip is a big goal for, for us, for next year. And just having some good family time just feels like the slog of modern life is just juggling who needs to be where at one time and not really focusing on what are we doing as a family together as a unit. So,

Marcus Ransom (01:49:16):
And lockdown hasn’t helped with that either, where everybody’s sort of Mm. Become these permits at home unless they’re specifically required to go somewhere else and mm-hmm. , you know, and when you’ve got, you know, a partner who is not remote and actually having to go mm-hmm. into the office, the, the, I know that’s something I’ve found is there’s this real disconnect between mm-hmm. , those who leave the house every day and those who don’t leave the house every day and mm-hmm.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:49:43):

Marcus Ransom (01:49:44):
Real, you know, going and doing, doing things together. We’re all leaving the house and it’s because we want to, not because, yeah. It’s part of our job.

Tom Bridge (01:49:53):
So we, uh, we recently, we, well just yesterday, uh, we, we got out of the house yesterday. It’s been incredibly cold here in the DC area. It’s just been frigid yesterday. It was gonna be an above freezing. And so we were like, fine, we gotta get out of the house. We got tickets to the Errands Space Museum, um, which is, uh, undergoing renovation, but they’ve opened up some of the exhibits again. Um, and so we, you know, the gift, the big gift for Charlie this year for Christmas was a new Apple watch. And so I got to use family setup for the first time. Um, that was an experience. I’ll talk more about that. I’ve got some blog post kind of pending about what was great, what was not. Um, but the whole point of this is that we want Charlie to be able to self navigate to and from school.

(01:50:36):
And part of doing that in DC means using the public transport system. And so it was a, a, a day of teaching him how his watch can help him. And so, you know, we talked him through, we were, we were like, all right, how are we getting to the Air and Space Museum? And, and we’re like, ask your watch. How is your watch gonna get you there? And it was the G eight bus to the Breadline Metro Station to, you know, transfer to the green line, go to the air and space. And, you know, it was really kind of lovely to see that kind of take place. Um, and, you know, aside from calling everyone in his contacts in the first 24 hours, um, multiple times, um, , we, we have to work on, we have to work on some phone manners, um, and messaging, hygiene, manners and all sorts of other things like this. What are their proper expectations for, for, for these technologies? Digital

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:51:23):
Citizenship.

Tom Bridge (01:51:24):
Correct. All of those useful things. Um, best

Marcus Ransom (01:51:27):
Way to test is in production.

Tom Bridge (01:51:29):
Uh, yes. Uh, the, the, the thing that I’m gonna work on this year that’s non-tech is language. So my wife discovered a co you know, six months ago that there are, uh, I, if your family immigrated from Italy to the United States, if you can trace an unbroken line of relatives back to the old country, you were an Italian citizenship. You just need to convince the Italian government of that. Um, and so she’s in the process of gathering of the documents, including talking to people in Italy and getting them to send documents to the United States. Um, and you know, it’s funny because there is no requirement for her or for Charlie that they speak Italian. But if I, Tom Bridge want to, you know, get an Italian passport after that’s complete, I have to learn Italian. And so this year I’m learning Italian. I found a couple of courses on Udemy through my work Udemy account, and I’m gonna start taking those. I’ve set aside, I’ve already got the calendar block in places. I’ve got 30 minutes a week of like formal Italian TRA training. I’m gonna com compliment that with Duo Lingo.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:52:41):
I was gonna say Duo is a great Yeah. And Duo the language app, not Duo Mobility, correct. The Yes. Right. They’re def they’re Duo with the Owl.

Tom Bridge (01:52:51):
Yes, the Owl.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:52:52):
Great Learning app.

Tom Bridge (01:52:53):
Mm-hmm. ,

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:52:54):
Great Language learning

Tom Bridge (01:52:56):
App. So I’m gonna focus on that cuz I mean, it was really fun. You know, I, I went to Spain. We went to Spain this past year for Objective By the Sea, and that was a great conference, a great opportunity to learn a little bit of Spanish. And so by the time we’d left I could at least order off the menu and have good conversation with the waiter. And like, they, it was funny because you could tell who would had a little bit of patience for foreigners and who didn’t. And they, they, if they don’t have any patience, they switched right to English. Cuz they’re just like, I need to get this over with, um, instead of letting you practice, um, because you’re murdering my language and it hurts me inside. Uh, I’m not saying that that happened to me except for the part where I’m saying it did happen to me.

(01:53:35):
Um, but, you know, that was a part of this past year that I really enjoyed and that I think really kind of tapped into some brain pathways that I, that I have. I am, I, I love language. I think language is amazing. And as someone who’s a musician, I had to learn how to sing in Italian and French and Spanish and German and all of these things. And, you know, I can sound out the words no problem because the, the every language has a set of rules and you learn ’em real quick when you’re a vocalist. Um, so I, I feel like I’m not gonna struggle too hard on the pronunciation side of it. I’m gonna have to learn grammar and that’s the scary part.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:54:12):
Mm-hmm. , that’s where I’ve, I always get stuck with German. I’ve on and off studied German forever. Why am I putting this word after that word? I don’t

Tom Bridge (01:54:22):
. Who knows?

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:54:22):
. I don’t even, uh, I remember that conversation about citizenship. I figured, I figured out I could file for Polish citizenship if I wanted to, which is fun because my great grand, I’m enough generations out. My great-grandparents moved here, both of them from Poland, so I could go fi Italy is interesting. I can trace family back to Italy too. So that’s good to know if they’ve

Tom Bridge (01:54:45):
Never ren announced yours. No, and you can, and now here is the, here is the, the other fun part of this. It it’s largely patrilineal. Yeah. Unless that relative was born after 1948. So

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:55:00):
Yeah, that’s the tough one because it was my dad’s mom who was Sicilian placeI, ah,

Tom Bridge (01:55:06):
Uh, Tiff’s family also from, from Sicily. Mm-hmm. . And, uh, Campo Fliche is, is the, is the kuk that she’s, that her family can trace their records back to. Um, she, she had a lot of fun going online through the Campo Fliche records because somebody online like got the records and had them scanned. Um, and so it’s fun. All of this is longhand writing in books. Um, thanks of all people to Napoleon, uh, who when he took over Italy was like, all right, you people need to get, have some record keeping and this is how it works.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:55:40):
That is, well, I appreciate that you are getting the, you are married to an Italian

Tom Bridge (01:55:45):
Woman. I’m, I’m married to an Italian woman.

Marcus Ransom (01:55:47):
For, for those listening there is, I’m speaking with the hands, which is Yes.

Tom Bridge (01:55:52):
Mm.

Marcus Ransom (01:55:52):
Speaking with, I’m sure Duo Lingo has many,

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:55:55):
But I know with the hands, TIFF likely knows this as you do. You don’t overdo it. No. You use it a little to emphasis. That’s right. Crisis, right? That’s right. Yeah. My family is Sicilian and yeah. Oh yeah, for sure.

Marcus Ransom (01:56:07):
My, my my only, my only attempt at that is that, um, my wife Vicky can qualify for a Greek passport because her parents mm, both born in Greece. She studied there for a year. Um, the bureaucracy around that turned into a nightmare because her mother’s birth was never recorded. Um, and Greece is a, a country that is, uh, as well as inventing democracy, they also invented bureaucracy that comes with democracy. And so that’s, that’s been put off as a challenge. And technically I can then qualify for a Greek passport, but it also then means that I’ll qualify for Greek national service, which I don’t really want to go and hold a gun on a border with Turkey or something like that. So no,

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:56:51):
You don’t,

Marcus Ransom (01:56:52):
No. Not on my list of things I need to achieve.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:56:55):
No, you don’t worry. You’re gonna learn how to lay bricks and then you’ll be able to take care of any kind of engineering wall situation. You might be need to engineer yourself out of that requirement.

Marcus Ransom (01:57:06):
From my

Tom Bridge (01:57:07):
Father-in-law’s, I love that.

Marcus Ransom (01:57:08):
Stories of his time in Greek national service in the, in the would’ve would’ve been the early sixties, late fifties. I think I, my degree of Brick Lang would’ve fit in perfectly well there.

Emily Kausalik-Whittle (01:57:23):
Oh man.

Tom Bridge (01:57:24):
Well, it’s been another wonderful episode of the MCAD Men’s podcast because it’s been another great year of the MCAD Men’s podcast. Uh, as we go into 2023, it’ll mark our eighth year, ninth, oh my, I think that it started in 20 16, 20 15, somewhere in there. So it’s hard to imagine. You know, this might be year eight for us. Um, and, uh, I can’t wait to see what awaits us. Um, I’d like to thank our wonderful sponsors today, Kanji and Mosel. Uh, and you know, I think that, you know, as we go into the new year, I wish you all nothing but, uh, joy and, uh, prosperity, uh, for the new year that awaits us all. Uh, and here’s hoping that we get some great new things to talk about on this podcast during 2023. Thanks everybody. We’ll see you next time.

Marcus Ransom (01:58:14):
I’ll see you.

Tom Bridge:
The Mac Admins Podcast is a production of Mac Admins Podcast LLC. Our producer is Tom Bridge. Our sound editor and mixing engineer is James Smith. Our theme music was produced by Adam Codega the first time he opened GarageBand. Sponsorship for the Mac Admins Podcast is provided by the MacAdmins.org Slack, where you can join thousands of Mac admins in a free Slack instance. Visit macadmins.org. And also by Technolutionary LLC: technically, we can help. For more information about this podcast and other broadcasts like it, please visit podcast.macadmins.org. Since we’ve converted this podcast to APFS, the funny metadata joke is at the end.