416: Interview With Annie Chen VP Of Product At Splashtop Inc

Topics:

• This week we are joined by Annie Chen, the VP of product management at Splashtop.

• Splashtop is a Silicon Valley company founded in 2006 that started off as a browser based product.

• Today they focus on remote access to your devices, working closely with GPU manufacturers to optimize and leverage hardware encoding to achieve high performance.

• Jerry commends Splashtop on the feature parity and he talks about how Mac had seemed to always receive the short end of the stick with other remote access products.

• Splashtop has three major offerings: Splashtop Business Access, Splashtop Remote Support - useful for MSPs looking to replace their RMM products, and Splashtop SOS for quick remote access.

• It is easy to try out and adjust to Splashtop, which Jerry found really helpful.

• Sam recently tried to use SOS with a customer and ran up against macOS security settings but was able to deal with it by blindly typing in admin credentials on a Mac

• Annie explains how the Safe Reboot feature works, which will help you reboot a computer remotely without losing access.

• Jerry likes how the screens that Splashtop SOS presents to the clients because it makes it easier for them to know what to do.

• Joe has been really happy with the consumer side of Splashtop as well.

• With Splashtop’s next version release, Mac Streamer will support native hardware encoding.

• They have recently formalized their MSP support group and an advisory panel.

• Splashtop is also working on having a specific build for M1 that they hope will be a universal binary and installed on Mac as a whole.

• They have just launches a monthly subscription plan for Splashtop’s remote support product.

• With Splashtop your subscription can grow as your business does.

• The group is impressed with Splashtop’s feature set in general.

• Jerry mentioned how Splashtop’s competitor would show advertisements even though you paid for the product.

• Focusing on security and protection, Splashtop has set up a security advisory counsel as well.

• Annie says the remote support and SOS products are really great for MSPs and service class teams.

• Visit Splashtop.com to set up a free trial and see what all the fuss is about.

408: The Mystery System

Topics:

• Sam talks about how efficient the MFA set up on 1Password is.

• When clients are prepared with their 1Password vault it makes it a lot easier for the group to do their jobs.

• Creating a vault with client data can be very helpful.

• Does anyone create separate vaults for each of their clients?

• 1Password is huge for teams, however, setting it up isn’t always worth it if it’s just for one person.

• Joe talks about the new, app-less 1Password extension.

• Sam shares information from a recent article that came out about chrome data-harvesting.

  • He says: DO NOT USE CHROME!

  • https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2021/03/20/stop-using-google-chrome-on-apple-iphone-12-pro-max-ipad-and-macbook-pro/?sh=29a801574d08

• Joe shares a story about a client who had a scary problem with the Nest security system because they didn’t migrate their account when Google bought out Nest. They refused to return her money when they weren’t providing the monitoring services she was paying for.

• Lately companies have seemed a little lax when it comes to their clients threatening to cancel their service.

• Sam is very hesitant to recommend Kitcast because of an issue he had with the customer service. They actually discovered they had a problem with how they deploy their app but they seem to be very slow on fixing it.

• Joe asks Sam about his billing and MSP that they had talked about 6 months ago and the two of them discuss how they bill their clients.

• Sam talks about an “uncouth” interaction he had with a rude client.

• Joe explains how he used Omni Disk Sweeper to help discover what was causing a weird problem for one of his clients.

• What is the mystery “System” that often contains a lot of data that seems to be non-removable?

407: A Ticking Time Bomb In Your Business

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Topics:

• What exactly is technical debt?

• Jerry has two pretty big professional clients who have accumulated quite a bit of technical debt.

• Spending money on important things will save you the trouble of dealing with it later.

• The group talks about how these clients who refuse to spend money sometimes aren’t sustainable.

• News Flash: On TeamViewer you can now disable in-product marketing messages.

• Sam is looking into a business continuity document that can be very useful especially with clients who don’t listen (thanks to Michael Thompsen of Origin84 for the tip).

• When your system can’t keep up with you it can cause you to be unproductive because you end up wasting time on things and switching tasks.

• Sam tells a story about how one of his client’s old systems finally kicked the bucket and he had to get all of their data back.

• Tip: Update your software about every 2 to 3 years.

• You end up paying less to keep up with updates than to fix everything when it goes wrong.

• Joe actually had to buy floppy disks for a job he had to do on a Powerbook 100.

• Jerry shares two useful tools he uses: Smith.ai and a helpful calendar app called Harmonizely. Harmonizely allow clients to schedule appointments and offers direct integration with Daylite..

• Daylight training has been transformative for Jerry.

• Sam can’t bring himself to start offering calendaring services to his clients. One reason is a need for control.

• Joe also talks about showing just how unavailable you might be.

• Jerry talks about the mysterious “alien arrow” that one of Joe’s clients has been telling him about.

• What is Casper Sky??

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403: I Hope You Find Honest Work One Day

Topics:

All roads lead to automated support…

• Someone tried to hustle Jerry and he exacts revenge.

• Scammers get scammed.

• Is the warrantee on your car expiring?

• Jerry felt like a hero after fixing a client’s difficult 2013 mac. Hint, it had to do with /private/tmp

• Should we officially not recommend hardware updates for 2013 iMac computers since they cannot run Big Sur?

• Joe praises Addigy for their new feature “Addigy Live Desktop” and talks about how useful this tool can be.

• He shares a very helpful tip that solved the common problem of getting stuck while trying to restore from a Time Machine backup with Synology.

• Sam ends up in a familiar situation with a client who just won’t listen to him and ended up getting themselves into a difficult situation when network equipment fails.

• The group shares ideas to help Sams issues with a problem client.

• What do you do if you have a client who won’t take your security advice and they can possibly get themselves into trouble?

• Jerry has a client who likes to mess around with the Unifi gateway.

• He has a Pro Tip for managing the date/time on a UniFi Gateway via SSH.
  admin@ubnt:~$ set date ntp 0.ubnt.pool.ntp.org

• Sam hopes Joe finds honest work someday.

399: Interview With Amy McKnight of The Mac Spa & My Mac Mentor

Topics:

-This week we welcome Amy McKnight, owner of The Mac Spa and Mac Mentor. 

-Amy talks about choosing the Fit Bit over the Apple Watch. 

-It spawns a conversation about fitness. 

-She tells us her story about dealing with the pandemic in the early days and how it affected her businesses. She also used it as an opportunity to pursue other avenues. 

-Amy’s goal has been to reach more people in more places. To that end, they have put their classes on Zoom and made them available to customers outside of the Denver area. 

-As they go more virtual, her company is looking for more partners to help broaden their reach. 

-Joe has been doing remote work for a lot longer than any of us and her inadvertently prepared for these times. 

-How much of these changes are permanent?

-Amy’s primary market is the residential space and focus is on empowering people to understand the technology. 

-Classes are more scalable than the break/fix part of IT. 

-Mac Mentor has some core classes like intro to Mac and managing passwords. 

-Both Amy and Steve have a presentation setup with multiple computers and devices. 

-Friday’s are Q&A sessions just for members. 

-Recurring fees for classes is a great way to keep a good customer base. 

-The Class Pass is now available as an affiliate program. Interested affiliates can sign up with Mac Mentor

-Jerry describes how this can fill a niche for consultants that are busy “fixing”. 

-Stress free support appears to be the opposite of Jerry’s experience. 

-Amy ordered a new MacBook Pro with the M1 chip. 

388: Adam Engst of TidBITS Content Network Discusses Apple's M1 Silicon

Topics:

-Adam Engst of TidBITS Content Network joins us to talk about Apple’s release of the M1 chips.

-We talk about “One More Thing...”

-Joe goes on a tear about some history of Mac. 

-Joe is proud of his first generation JamBox. 

-Adam is very excited about the benchmarks he is reading about the M1 chips. 

-Even Rosetta 2 is showing a benchmark of 80% of native use!

-Adam talks about unified memory and how the memory is built in to the M1 chip. 

-Thermal capacity in the new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and Mac mini is discussed. The MacBook Air doesn’t even have a fan!

-Sam & Joe are emotionally scarred from recent MacBook Air models. 

-Adam is not impressed with the Touch Bar on the MacBook Pro. 

-While we were once concerned about first generation chips, everything we are hearing has us excited. 

-Battery life is a notable difference that users will be most aware of. 

-50 of recent Mac purchases were customers new to the Mac. 

-Adam warns about issues to be wary of with Big Sur when it comes to third party backup programs like Carbon Copy Cloner and Super Duper. 

-Time Machine in Big Sur now uses APFS. You will likely want to start your backups fresh. 

-The low end MacBook Air has a 7 core CPU instead of an 8 core. Why?

-Adam is going to test his new computer by dumping all his apps in Login Items to see how it responds. 

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