So Far, So OK
Casey:
In the show notes, someone has deleted a very important note.
Casey:
That note read as follows.
Casey:
B*** it, John.
Casey:
This looks an awful f***ing lot like homework.
Casey:
Because I'm assuming it wasn't Marco that put in all sorts of information about photos for OS X. It's not homework.
Casey:
It looks an awful lot like homework.
Casey:
The...
John:
bare minimum of getting anything written down about a topic and it's like oh my goodness if i didn't write this down there would be nothing there just to be like a bullet point that said photos i'm just saying i don't like the look of homework yeah no casey this is not homework this is simply research that was done in john's home that was in preparation for uh some future work big research i went to web pages and copy and pasted some stuff
John:
it's no more research than getting the feedback emails we get and copying and pasting information from them into here and then you complain like you didn't give me a link to that tweet so apparently it's okay for me to do homework then when you can't find a link to a tweet on your on your own but now i can't anyway but it'll be fine oh goodness all right well now that i've publicly shamed you and then inevitably shamed myself we should probably do some follow-ups so let's start with pity pong i hope i said that right
John:
I went back and forth like five emails trying to get this name right.
John:
P.T.
John:
Pong.
John:
He wrote us about the Thailand crisis that caused the hard drive problems because of how many hard drives are manufactured there.
John:
And in the past show, I had attributed it to a tsunami with a bunch of waffle words around it like tsunami or something.
John:
Anyway, it was not a tsunami.
John:
It was a severe flood in 2011 that caused this problem with hard drives.
John:
The tsunami was in 2004 in a different part of Thailand.
John:
And apparently the Seagate hard drive factories were not in the flooding area.
John:
So why would their quality go down?
John:
This is in relation to the Backblaze blog post we talked about last show about how they bought a bunch of Seagate hard drives around the time of the flood and like 90% of them were dead in four years.
John:
maybe more pressure on the one remaining working factory maybe parts they got were bad like all sorts of i can imagine uh this email said that it's you know we can say that sea factories were almost almost were not affected by the severe flooding maybe not like directly as in they were had water in them but clearly something related to the flood went wrong to cause their that batch of drives to be terrible like they bought thousands of drives and 90 dead in four years is not a good deal so
John:
Anyway, we got the natural disaster wrong, and apparently their factory wasn't underwater, but they were clearly affected.
John:
They also might have just sucked.
John:
Well, I suppose, but you saw those numbers.
John:
Those are outside the margin of error, especially for Backblaze for them to call it out.
John:
They bought tons of different hard drives from different manufacturers, and there's some fluctuations, but that was ridiculous.
Casey:
So on a related, well, quasi-related note, do you guys have spare drives for your Synologies just in case one dies?
Casey:
I don't.
Marco:
I did that for a while, but now instead of doing that, now I just converted it to one of the raid modes that keeps hot spares anyway.
Marco:
I used to have spares sitting outside of it, and I recognize now this is less good than that, but it's not going to make that big of a difference.
Casey:
So you're using the Synology Hybrid RAID or whatever it's called, the SHR, I think it is?
Marco:
I have used that in the past.
Marco:
It's a little slow for me.
Marco:
So now I have my whole crazy iSCSI setup, which I never actually talked about fully on this show.
Marco:
But now my entire Synology is one giant iSCSI volume with whatever RAID variant of RAID 5 or 6 that has two disks that are able to fail.
Marco:
So I have that plus one hot spare that's ready to be swapped into that if needed.
Marco:
And then I have just all one giant iSCSI volume that's accessed by network shares on this Mac Mini that I have that's doing the live stream right now.
Marco:
And so that way, the Mac Mini serves the role of being my standalone live streaming box, so I don't have to worry about software updates breaking it, which is always a problem with audio stuff.
Marco:
Meanwhile, it also runs Backblaze on it to back up the entire contents of that iSCSI volume as a network share and also serves it over the network to other computers on my network.
Casey:
Interesting.
Marco:
So it's complicated.
Casey:
Yeah, for my Synology, I have two physical volumes that are my Time Machine backups in whatever RAID is completely not redundant because it's just Time Machine and I don't really care.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, I have that too.
Marco:
Sorry, I forgot.
Marco:
Yeah, I do have two disks in there that are in RAID 0 that are just for Time Machine.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And then I have the other six that are using Synology, whatever it is, RAID.
Casey:
I keep wanting to say hybrid, but I feel like that's wrong.
Marco:
That's what it is.
Marco:
SHR.
Casey:
Oh, it is.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
And so I've been thinking about one of these days when I have a little bit of extra money for Amazon, I should just get...
Casey:
another like three terabyte drive and just have it sitting there waiting in case something in case something goes wrong.
Casey:
But then the other side of me thinks, well, I could overnight myself one if I really got desperate and one failed.
Casey:
So what's the big deal?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I was just curious if you guys had any spares.
Casey:
What's your approach on this, John?
John:
Yeah, I use mine in a weird way.
John:
I do have a separate Time Machine volume, like both of you, because basically I think you can only have one Time Machine volume.
John:
I have it actually set up as RAID 1 because it's the one part of the system that I wanted a little bit of redundancy on and didn't really care too much about speed.
John:
So it's not RAID 0.
John:
So it's a two-disc RAID 1 volume for Time Machine.
John:
And I backup, uh, both of my computers over the network to that time machine thing.
John:
Uh, by the way, someone asked on Twitter, like they showed me their backup setup and they said, is this, do you think this is sufficient?
John:
I gave them a thumbs up or something.
John:
One thing I realized now that they were missing is, uh,
John:
I think when they added this, maybe Mountain Lion or maybe it was even Yosemite.
John:
They added the ability to add multiple targets for time machine.
John:
So you could add a disk to your time machine thing and it will back up also to that disk.
John:
So it won't like back up half to one and half to the other.
John:
We'll do a full backup to one target and a full backup to the other target and basically alternate.
John:
And I do that.
John:
One of my time machine backups is to a local disk that's sitting on the desk with my with the two respective computers.
John:
And another time machine backup is over the network to the Synology on their RAID 1 volume.
John:
and they both fit on there um and then the rest of the discs i don't do anything with a raid i had it ranged differently in the beginning but now i don't do anything with raid because basically you know raid is not a backup strategy raid is mostly there to make sure your downtime is as small as possible but i don't care if my downtime is a couple days or even a week or whatever there's nothing essential on there uh it's just you know media and stuff like that mostly so i have
John:
A bunch of different volumes that are complete copies of each other.
John:
Like I have my media volume.
John:
My media fits in under three terabytes.
John:
So I think I have like three or four copies of my media.
John:
One of them is synced with like the built-in Synology thing to the other one.
John:
One of them I copy with Carbon Copy Cloner on my Mac to the other volume at different intervals.
John:
uh and it's it's very strange but basically what i wanted to have is like look if one of these things goes bad i can just yank it out order a new hard drive from amazon it doesn't really matter what size it is because they weren't in a raid set or anything it's just like a new hard drive right and while i do that i still have two more copies of all my data like basically i'm taking advantage of the fact that this synology holds a tremendous amount of data and i don't have that much data so i'm using it as a series of volumes and uh
John:
So far, the drives have been fine.
John:
I'm not really worried about them failing.
John:
You guys get that monthly disk health report.
John:
Synology will email you and say, here's the health report for your disks.
John:
It will tell you how many bad sectors and how many errors or whatever.
John:
All zeros every month on these things.
John:
So I'm not particularly worried about them.
John:
Lots of redundant data on there.
John:
Basically, I have the same set of data copied multiple times on multiple plain old single disk volumes.
Casey:
Yeah, that's really not bad.
Casey:
That's not the answer I expected, but I can get behind that.
John:
And I have spare empty disks still, so if I need to put something else in.
John:
It seemed like a strange setup to me, and I tried different arrangements, but in the end, it's like, look, I don't care about downtime.
John:
I just care about the data being safe.
John:
And I know now if I download something or rip something and put it in my media drive, it will slowly migrate to the other copies of the media drive over time, and I'll have three copies of it.
Marco:
And do neither of you guys have online backup for your Synology stuff?
John:
I do.
John:
I mount it on my wife's computer, and then I use CrashPlan, which can back up network drives.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
Ditto.
Marco:
Yeah, that's the one thing I wish Backblaze did.
Marco:
And they've said a number of times that it's just kind of a cost issue...
Marco:
because NAS drives can be huge.
Marco:
But I really hope... They've always said that they are thinking about it in the future.
Marco:
I really hope they do network drives because that's the one downside of it.
Marco:
And I like it so much without that that I'd go through this crazy setup with mounting iSCSI on a Mac Mini to have it be hosted on a Mac officially and have it be backed up that way.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I've tried CrashPlan running on the Synology because they have an actual client that runs on there.
Marco:
I've tried CrashPlan running on a Mac that's backing it up over the network.
Marco:
And whatever the reason is, it doesn't work for me.
Marco:
And there's some kind of issue...
Marco:
The CrashPlan client is still written in Java, and there's some kind of issue where you start hitting weird memory limits if you have a large number of files, regardless of the file size, I think.
Marco:
I think it's just if you have a very large number of files, the CrashPlan client can start crapping out and doing weird things and erroring out or being just ridiculously slow to upload them or to track them.
Marco:
And I hit those problems every time I've tried CrashPlan, whether it was on the Synology itself or on a Mac.
Marco:
And I've tried... There are so many alternative configuration files.
Marco:
I even blogged about one when I found one that I thought worked, and it worked for a week and then stopped working.
Marco:
I've had nothing but trouble trying to back up a very large number of files to CrashPlan.
John:
That was one of my strategies for the Synology 2 is big files.
John:
So it's like movie rips and like, you know, even the time machine thing, it's disk images.
John:
It's not all the little individual time machine files because when you do time machine over a network, it makes huge disk images.
John:
It is just really big files.
John:
So it's not a million files.
John:
It is a small number of multi-gigabyte files.
John:
And I think that's why I'm able to get away with CrashPlan backing it up.
John:
yeah i dig it um moving on we should talk about the new macbook battery uh the life it has under load i'm not sure if this was john or marco that added this we were wondering a couple shows back this new macbook it's really skinny it's got a very tiny little battery in there it's got a very low uh power cpu and the the battery life we weren't sure about because it hadn't shipped yet and like
John:
Well, maybe it gets the battery life, they say, if you use it lightly.
John:
But what is it like if you use it heavily?
John:
If you really stress this thing by, you know, just using Xcode constantly or using Photoshop or Final Cut or something like, if you really, really use this, does the battery life drop dramatically?
John:
Because, like, the CPU is like, oh, I'm going to be very conservative and sip power.
John:
But, like, you know, the ratings are like 1.1 gigahertz or 1.3, but it turbos up to, like, 2.9.
John:
It's like, what if you leave it in turbo mode all the time?
John:
Is it just going to destroy your battery?
John:
um and marco was musing that rather than just seeing battery life tests of like maybe a heavy and light load he would like to see deltas like how much worse is the battery life on this laptop in heavy usage versus light usage and he was guessing that maybe the new macbook would not be that great in that area because maybe gets all its power savings from being really careful but if you really stress it it just becomes more like a regular cpu so
John:
true to form and in tech did that test with a bunch of laptops and as it turns out the new macbook one one port to 12 inch retina whatever you want to call it thing has the best performance of any of the apple laptops they tested when comparing its high load versus as low load it retains 62.2 percent of its battery life and the next best one is 59 and it goes down with the 11 inch
John:
2011 MacBook Air being the worst, where it gets like 38%, 38.3% of its low load battery life.
John:
So we'll put a link to this in the show notes.
John:
It's a pleasant surprise that the newest notebook not only has the lowest power CPU and the tiniest battery, but also takes the smallest hit when you use it at load.
John:
Now, Marco's blog post, I think, was about how
John:
All of these are not great, that all of them have this great battery life if you just surf the web.
John:
But if you use any of them hard, forget about all day.
John:
You're down into the four or five hour range.
Marco:
Yeah, that was the most depressing part for me because, you know, Apple loves to use this phrase all day battery life now.
Marco:
And of course, what is considered all day varies by what device they're talking about and also by how you're using it.
Marco:
And so all day battery life on the watch is, from all the reviews we've heard so far, sufficient to actually last through the day for most people.
Marco:
Unless you're really using it a lot and having the screen on a lot.
Marco:
Then some of the reviews have said, oh, I had to charge it midway through the day or whatever.
Marco:
But it seemed like for the most part, that's fairly accurate if you use it lightly the way Apple has made it possible to use today.
Marco:
The iPhone and iPad are both similarly advertised.
Marco:
I don't know if they've actually used the phrase all-day battery life on the iPhone yet.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure they've used it on the iPad.
Marco:
And similarly advertised of, yeah, all-day.
Marco:
And the iPad, that actually seems pretty accurate.
Marco:
It seems like it gets about 8 to 10 hours of battery life, depending on what it's doing most of the time.
Marco:
The iPhone is more varied, you know, it seems to depend more on what you're doing and things like, you know, radio reception, how hard the cell radio is working, whether you're using GPS or not, things like that.
Marco:
The laptops, you know, Apple advertises them as having generally, I think they're the lowest claim they make now is like seven hours and that's on the 15 inch, something like that.
Marco:
And their claims are pretty accurate if you compare them to other third-party light web browsing type tasks.
Marco:
And the Adantech one here, they showed basically the same thing, that their numbers line up pretty well with Apple's for a light web browsing workload.
Marco:
The problem, though, is... And so, you know, light web browsing workloads right now you can get... If you consider the old MacBook Air, the non-retina MacBook Air, you can get 12 hours on the 13-inch.
Marco:
But if you only want a retina machine, which I was saying, like, you know, at this point, I think most buyers who are considering buying a new laptop today, the smart move, obviously, I think, is to go retina.
Marco:
Like, I wouldn't consider any other machine today besides a retina machine.
Marco:
So, you know, so for that, you're maxing out at eight hours of light usage.
Marco:
And if you're using it and that's only that's like not even the 15 inch.
Marco:
If you get the 15 inch, you're maxing out more like six to seven of light usage.
Marco:
And then the heavy usage, which their heavy usage is not even that heavy.
Marco:
It's like it's like it's still web browsing, but I think it's like loading pages more frequently and also downloading a large file and playing a movie in the background.
Marco:
I wouldn't call that a very heavy workload.
Marco:
You're probably not maxing out any of the cores for a sustained amount of time.
Marco:
This is a very generous definition of a heavy workload.
John:
Well, the movie playing in the background is substantial because it is just never giving the CPU a break.
John:
It's always just decoding, decoding.
Marco:
Maybe.
John:
Unless it's using hardware H.264.
John:
Oh, I'm sure it is.
Marco:
But still, I mean, that's not a very... I mean, that would have been a heavy test in 2006.
Marco:
That is not a very heavy test in 2015.
Marco:
But either way, okay, that's fine.
Marco:
Under that allegedly heavy workload, none of the retina machines get over five hours.
Marco:
The new MacBook One gets 5.03 hours on an NSEX test.
Marco:
Every other one was below five.
Marco:
And the 15s are 4.
Marco:
And this makes me sad as somebody who usually wants the 15-inch laptop.
Marco:
So these numbers, this is not all-day battery life.
Marco:
And this is my main disappointment here in the current lineup is that...
Marco:
If you actually use it in any way heavily, you're not going to make it on a cross-country flight necessarily.
Marco:
You're probably not going to make it all day at work if you forgot your adapter at home.
Marco:
Stuff like that.
Marco:
These scenarios that don't necessarily happen every day, but it's clear that Apple is pushing that direction.
Marco:
Like the MacBook 1 having no MagSafe.
Marco:
We talked about this a lot before.
Marco:
Where it's pretty clear through the way they were things.
Marco:
And even just the way it's designed.
Marco:
It's pretty clear that they don't intend for this thing to be used plugged in all the time.
Marco:
They intend for it to be more like an iPad.
Marco:
Where you plug it in to charge it at night, basically.
Marco:
And you use it all day without being plugged in.
Marco:
And presumably you're moving about somewhat.
Marco:
But that's...
Marco:
as we can see from this, under the heavy workload here, even the MacBook One only lasted five hours.
Marco:
So, that's a pretty short day if you're not plugging it in.
Marco:
And all the other ones even fare much worse.
Marco:
So, my argument here is I wish there were some models that broke out of this pattern.
Marco:
Like, the heavy workload battery life, these are such small numbers.
Marco:
And
Marco:
Right now, Apple... Like, there used to be different categories of laptops.
Marco:
There would be, like, the desktop replacement and then, like, the kind of mid-range and then the thin and light ultra portables.
Marco:
Right now, it seems like everything Apple makes is a thin and light ultra portable.
Marco:
And so, my argument is I wish they would make...
Marco:
Not even many, but just like one or two models that traded thin and lightness a little bit for a bigger battery and just offered really great battery life.
Marco:
I'm not asking for their entire line to do this.
Marco:
I know a thinness is sexy and it sells really well and that's great and they love it and that's fine.
Marco:
I get the appeal there, but...
Marco:
I wish it wasn't the only choice in the lineup.
Marco:
All these things are moving some sliders and making all these trade-offs.
Marco:
There's so many trade-offs to be made here with designing a physical thing like this, especially with battery power versus weight.
Marco:
And thinness...
Marco:
I want to be clear.
Marco:
Thinness is not usually the main goal.
Marco:
I think the main goal is weight savings, and thinness is something you can do afterwards as a result of having removed components from the inside that were big and heavy.
Marco:
But I wish there were other options here.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
A lot of people have pointed to, well, you can get an external battery pack for things like the iPhones and iPads and the MacBook One, now that it has USB-C.
Marco:
That's probably going to be compatible with external battery packs as well, though.
Marco:
It seems like there aren't any that really have enough power yet.
Marco:
But that will happen.
Marco:
You'll be able to get external battery packs, and that's good.
Marco:
But you can't do it yet.
Marco:
That's problem number one.
Marco:
And problem number two is, as you see with the iPhone and battery solutions there, external battery packs have a huge cost associated with using them, rather than just having more battery life in the device to begin with.
Marco:
It's similar to how I was complaining a few weeks back about how USB hubs are all pretty terrible, and that by removing USB ports and forcing people to use hubs, you're forcing people to trade a nice, reliable, internal, integrated thing for an external thing made by random third parties that usually isn't very good.
Marco:
batteries have similar issues where if the device has good battery life up front built in then it's it's just nicer it's better if you have to rely on external batteries external batteries have their own charging circuitry they have their own cases if you're talking about like an iphone battery case that means you have like
Marco:
two different layers of plastic or metal uh around this battery that you have to then add to the thickness of the phone rather than just having it built in and skipping all those layers uh you have ports to worry about you have different cables you have to keep it charged somehow and it charges separately and it might not be like a pass-through kind of charge or you have a different cable there's so many little annoyances and and costs and burdens taxes really associated with relying on external battery packs to supplement your devices
Marco:
It's so much nicer and more efficient to have them built in.
John:
We were talking about this earlier in the week, I think.
John:
I mentioned like a Mophie for your Apple Watch.
John:
Same deal with the Apple Watch.
John:
Not a lot of battery life.
John:
Well, get a crazy G-Shock looking Mophie type case that clamps onto the thing somehow and provides extra battery power by making it bulkier.
John:
Well, with the MacBook One, how about like an iPhone Mophie style thing for the MacBook One that clamps onto the bottom and makes it thicker, right?
John:
Or, you know, thinking of the logical conclusion of your
Marco:
sort of battery outlier thing is bring back the 17 inch put the macbook one's cpu inside it and just fill the rest with battery still still one port of course that's the thing too because because they offer machines that have giant batteries uh but they have hotter cpus and gpus exactly like as you move up the battery capacity amount they also ramp up the component types so that you can't get
Marco:
a 15-inch MacBook Pro with a 15-watt TDP CPU in it, like the ones that go in the MacBook Air.
Marco:
They don't offer that option.
Marco:
And I would do that.
Marco:
If they offered... The MacBook One CPU is pretty low to get that 4.5-watt TDP.
Marco:
I might still take it, but it's pretty low.
Marco:
But even if they just put the MacBook Air class CPU, the 15-watt-ish TDP range, they take that and put it in the 15-inch rather than the 35, 40-watt TDPs they have in there for the quad-cores.
Marco:
I would buy that because then you'd have this computer that has way more battery life than the current 15s.
Marco:
And yeah, it wouldn't have as good a performance, but I don't necessarily need quad cores on my laptop.
Marco:
And I bet I'm not the only one.
Marco:
I mean, you can look right now, you can see the sales of the MacBook One being apparently pretty good considering you can't get them.
Marco:
It seems like the...
Marco:
sales are likely exceeding their projected demand for it um so obviously there there is demand here for things that have other qualities besides top performance uh man i would kill for it for well i wouldn't kill but i would love a 15 inch laptop that had a really low power cpu in it and just gave me all that bonus battery life as a trade-off to that
John:
you see the link they put in the chat room to this uh tough armor snap-on case for the apple watch this does not add battery to it but just merely makes your apple watch bigger and uglier it's so bad oh my god that was not a joke no look i put the link and look at the links in the chat room i saw a picture of this fly by on twitter i thought it was a joke yeah i mean i guess it protects the nice shiny if you get the sport one and don't want people to know you can cover it up with this thing like oh yeah it's the apple watch
Casey:
it's not the sport at all yeah i i don't i don't think i don't think you're gaining anything by adding this to it though yeah it's too bad it doesn't come with any battery so bad it's funny you were talking about thinness and battery life because although i don't have a lot to say about the battery life earlier today um i was at work and the it guy at work sent me an im and was like hey
Casey:
I have a Mac question for you.
Casey:
Would you mind coming over?
Casey:
And so I went over to his desk.
Casey:
And long story short, our CEO had upgraded from the very, very first Retina MacBook Pro to a brand new 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro.
Casey:
And the IT guy wanted to get our CEO's 160 or whatever it was gig VMware Fusion VM from one laptop to the other.
Casey:
And he had this like three terabyte external drive hanging off the old machine.
Casey:
And he said, well, it won't let me write to it.
Casey:
Why?
Casey:
Because it's NTFS.
Casey:
And so initially, you know, my first thought was, well, duh, let's just get a couple of Ethernet cables and hook it up to a switch and life will be good.
Casey:
Except they're too thin and they don't have Ethernet ports.
Casey:
And so I said, OK, we'll just get the stupid dongle.
Casey:
So you have.
Casey:
Oh, we don't have any dongles.
Casey:
And it's like, I understand why we want them to be thin.
Casey:
Just like you guys said, it's sexy, it sells, it's lighter in many cases, easier to carry.
Casey:
But God, what I wouldn't have given for a couple of darn Ethernet ports.
Casey:
Like, is that really too much to ask?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It just seems crazy to me.
Casey:
Why don't you just reboot into Windows?
Casey:
Well, and actually what he had said was, you know what, I'll dupe the VM and I'll have one of the VMs in Windows copy onto the external drive, copy the duplicate of the VM onto the external drive.
Casey:
So it's Windows writing to an NTFS partition.
Casey:
But that was really convoluted until, and we almost did it until we realized that, oh wait, we have other externals we can use and we can just format them to be HFS plus ding and pray for the best.
Casey:
Now, I did try AirDrop, but that was so unbelievably slow for a 160 gig file that we didn't even see the little circle progress meters start to fill in.
Marco:
Yeah, it's probably not really made for that.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
And you couldn't do Thunderbolt both ways?
Marco:
They have that now.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
I didn't know if that was a possibility, and I was confident we didn't have the cables, even if it was.
Marco:
Yeah, the problem with Thunderbolt networking is that nobody has Thunderbolt cables just lying around.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I agree with you guys.
Casey:
I wish just a shade more thickness I really don't think would be so bad.
Marco:
And again, it doesn't have to be the whole product line.
Marco:
It doesn't even have to be the main product.
Marco:
But the 13-inch MacBook Pro, the 15-inch MacBook Pro, these are things that are already a little bit past the mainstream.
Marco:
They're a little bit above the mainstream.
Marco:
The 15 is significantly above the mainstream.
Marco:
And I even said in the article, I wish they'd bring back the 17.
Marco:
And I got a lot of people saying, oh my god, I'll buy that in a second.
Marco:
People love the 17.
Marco:
But it's okay to have something at the top of the lineup that is not thin and light.
Marco:
If you look even at the new Mac Pro design, which we talked about at length in the past, but even if you look at that, they've made trade-offs there that...
Marco:
weren't necessarily... That nobody was really asking for.
Marco:
But they made them regardless in reducing the amount of slots and bays and ports and everything.
Marco:
And some of that is beneficial.
Marco:
And some of it is just kind of, well, I didn't really need that.
Marco:
But oh well.
Marco:
And again, I wish that for things like the pro customers, the pro products...
Marco:
I wish the thinness and lightness wasn't as high of a priority as it is.
Marco:
I still want them to work on that and bring that to the 15-inch line, but again, it doesn't have to be the only option.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Why don't you tell us about something that's cool these days?
Marco:
Our first sponsor this week is Cards Against Humanity.
John:
Oh, yes.
John:
so john what is the toaster oven of the week so this week we have the proctor silex durable toaster oven broiler model number i think this is a model number three one one one six r wow this is a small one very small i think it's the smallest toaster i've tried so far barely fits two slices of bread it looks very tiny and cute
Casey:
Wait, wait, wait.
Casey:
Is this white?
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
I asked not because of white.
Casey:
Ha ha ha ha.
Casey:
No, because I'm looking up on Amazon as you're talking to me about this.
Casey:
And as you're saying the words, you can barely fit two slices in it.
Casey:
I see the title on Amazon, which reads, and I'm reading this directly, Proctor Silex four-slice toaster oven, comma, white.
John:
That's definitely not it.
John:
Like the knobs are not even close.
John:
Anyway, very, very small two slices.
John:
If you're lucky, I think two big slices probably wouldn't even fit.
John:
It's got two.
John:
I think the quartz elements, the big larger ones that light up really quickly instead of like the resistive ones that are thinner and take a long time to glow.
John:
two big elements one on top one and bottom with really big nice metal guards over them it looks kind of cute but part of that cuteness is the fact that it has a curved top which is just a bad idea like because everyone wants to put stuff on top of the toaster at the very least you put the little tray that it comes with on top of the toaster maybe you put potholders on top of i know you probably shouldn't put a lot of stuff because it gets hot but people do and you don't have a lot of counter space you put stuff on top of the toaster you make it curved everything you put on top sort of wants to skitter off the side it's ridiculous so bad idea there
John:
door feels pretty flimsy the handle attached to the door feels flimsy when you open the door it feels like it might come off in your hand it doesn't pull the tray out when you open uh the pan like the little pan that comes with has a thing where it slides underneath the wire rack so you can kind of put something on the wire rack then if it drips it won't drip onto the heating element it'll drip into the pan but of course the pan will also block the heat i'm not entirely sure why that is in there but it's an interesting feature at least
John:
That tray sturdiness is reasonable.
John:
It doesn't look like it was stamped out of a piece of aluminum foil, but it's not particularly sturdy.
John:
It's got two knobs on front, a refreshingly simple interface, just two knobs, no buttons, no anything else.
John:
The top knob is for temperature.
John:
So you go from like zero to 450.
John:
And then if you go past 450, you're into the toast zone.
John:
It's got a Braille setting, too.
John:
That's like right around 450.
John:
And the bottom knob is basically just a timer.
John:
They put a bunch of markings on it.
John:
But what it boils down to is you turn it clockwise and it's a timer.
John:
You turn it to the left and it's just forced on and it stays on.
John:
um this toaster is a ticker so oh you must love that yeah the way you do anything with it is top knob either set it to a temperature to bake set it to broil or set it to toast and then to make it do anything you take the bottom knob and you you crank it either you put it to the force on position which i'm not sure why you do that maybe because like the bottom timer only goes to 15 minutes so if you want to go for longer than 15 and don't want to have to re-crank it just put it in the forced on position and then i guess don't forget that it's on or you'll burn your house down um
John:
But, yeah, you turn it to whatever you want.
John:
And they have little marks that look like toast getting darker around the five-minute mark.
John:
But bottom line, it's just a timer.
John:
Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.
John:
Pretty darn loud.
John:
Maybe two ticks a second.
John:
I really don't like ticking toasters.
John:
I just, you know, you don't want that in the morning.
John:
Do you want to have this loud thing ticking in your kitchen in the morning?
John:
I definitely don't.
John:
Really?
John:
I mean, I would think it would be helpful to help indicate that it is on.
John:
Well, I mean, like what I want from a toaster is, again, like informed by my childhood is when we had a little knob, you push it down.
John:
And then when it's done, it goes ding and little thing comes up.
John:
And that lets you know that your toast is done.
John:
In between, I don't need to know.
John:
Right.
John:
Just ding when you're done.
John:
That's all I want.
John:
Um, so, but anyway, since it's a small toaster and has the two big quartz elements, I had some high hopes that it would be a fast toaster, but it is way slow.
John:
It was like more than a minute slower than my other toaster to toast a single slice of bread.
John:
And the reason that does that is that the bottom element does not turn on.
John:
When you're in toast mode, the bottom element does not turn on when you're in broil mode.
John:
The only time the bottom heating element turns, I thought it was broken at first.
John:
The only time the bottom heating element turns on is when you're in bake mode.
John:
And I don't understand that at all.
John:
Like if I want to toast, I want both sides of the bread toasted.
John:
How are you going to toast both sides of the bread if you just turn on the top element?
John:
So it makes it super slow and it's stupid.
John:
So you like it.
John:
This is my least favorite toaster because it's really small.
John:
It's really slow.
John:
It ticks and it does something dumb.
John:
i didn't get the chances i'm thinking maybe if i put it on bake at 450 it would toast bread faster than if i put it on toast oh yeah and of course you have to turn it on it's exactly the right spot which is you know very fuzzy or whatever so big thumbs down on this toaster i had high hopes given just the specs and the size but it just does too many things wrong syracusa toast review
John:
Four slice capacity?
John:
You've got to be kidding me.
John:
Like, you know that cinnamon raisin bread that Pepperidge Farm sells?
John:
You know, that comes in a little plastic bag and it's pre-sliced?
John:
Yep.
John:
You know how small those slices are?
John:
I don't think you could fit four of them in here.
John:
Could you fit four Melba toasts in here?
John:
Four what?
Four.
John:
probably uh but no it is it is a ridiculous toaster for this price i would have to see the price of the two knob black and decker one because the two knob black and decker one was way better and just a little bit bigger uh and it was similarly featured two knobs turned to the right thing or whatever but it just did the job better it toasted actually toasted stuff like i would i could never wait for this thing to toast something and when it was done it would just have toasted the top so do not buy this toaster
Marco:
Well, thanks a lot to Cards Against Humanity for sponsoring this week.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
That was exciting.
Casey:
I love those.
Casey:
I love those.
Casey:
Speaking of exciting, John, one of your favorite albums is available again.
Casey:
Well, it never really wasn't available, but half of the internet has written us to inform us that the Journey soundtrack is available on vinyl.
Casey:
So are you picking a copy up?
Yeah.
John:
Everyone should have been writing to you because you might be excited about it.
John:
Why would I be excited about it?
John:
I have the Journey soundtrack in a digital form.
Casey:
Actually, I do as well.
John:
Yeah, and I would never want it on a record because A, I don't have anything to play it on, and B, why would I want that?
John:
Why?
Marco:
You mean you don't want things to be less convenient, scratchy, less reliable over time, bigger, and also sound worse?
Marco:
No, I do not.
John:
Maybe like their picture discs, they look kind of cool, and the album cover is kind of cool art-wise, but I do also have the Journey art books.
John:
I feel like I have the Journey artwork stuff covered.
Marco:
So it's at best a poster and at worst a trinket.
John:
Yep.
John:
I mean, it's like maybe a kind of a neat collectible thing, but I would never play it or anything.
John:
But, you know, Casey might like it.
John:
Get them and bring them to your dad's fancy turntable, right?
Casey:
Well, that's the thing, is I was going to remind the internet, who seems to forget so often, that I actually do not own a turntable.
Casey:
And I think that...
Casey:
And I think that people seem to forget that just because I fancy turntables and just because I think that the tea ceremony is fun and I won't say whether or not I think they sound better.
Casey:
But I actually do not own a turntable.
Casey:
And of course, anytime anything happens, even vaguely related to vinyl, half the Internet comes to remind me either that vinyl is terrible or, oh, ha ha, look, people are actually buying vinyl.
Casey:
You're all frickin crazy, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
But no, I actually do not own a turntable.
Casey:
And I'd like to get one at some point, but I don't have one.
Casey:
So I'm not going to be buying this either.
Casey:
And if I did, just like you said, John, I'd be bringing it to dads to listen to it there.
Marco:
Out of curiosity, was the Journey soundtrack originally recorded onto an analog medium and then kept analog through its entire editing and mastering process?
John:
Oh, surely not.
John:
It is recordings of people playing instruments, so it started off analog in that respect.
Marco:
Okay, so it isn't purely an electronic music soundtrack.
Marco:
I don't mind people who like vinyl.
Marco:
I just mind when they start saying it sounds better.
Marco:
Because it sounds different, and by...
Marco:
Almost every actual objective measure, it sounds worse.
Marco:
But it does sound different.
Marco:
In some ways, it can be more pleasing to people, or it can bring back fond memories of the past.
Marco:
And that's why it's popular.
Marco:
None of those things are evidence to tell people that it just sounds better.
John:
Well, it's popular now because it's retro.
John:
That's why the quote-unquote hipsters like it, because it is...
John:
Because they don't have any nostalgic, probably.
John:
They were already on a live.
John:
Their parents didn't play record albums for them when they were young, but it is a retro thing.
Marco:
Yeah, there is effectively no technical merit for it.
Marco:
There are lots of other reasons to enjoy it, but any technical argument is not founded in reality.
Casey:
Are you done?
Casey:
I think so.
Casey:
For today.
Casey:
I so deeply regret bringing this up.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So we should probably bring up WWDC tickets and how that turned out.
Casey:
We've been asked several times.
Casey:
I have not knowingly replied to anyone on Twitter.
Casey:
I didn't know what the group of us wanted to do, if we wanted to make it a surprise or we wanted to share.
Casey:
And we have concluded we would like to share.
Casey:
So, John, are you going to be able to go to WWDC?
John:
uh i don't know i entered the wwc ticket lottery and i did not get a ticket in the lottery and i am not going without a ticket uh so there you have it if i don't get a ticket i'm not going right now i i am not going i still have my hotel booked because it's easy to cancel up to 24 hours before but i do not have any flights booked and i'm not going without a ticket so i'm kind of bummed by that and i was especially bummed uh hearing all the other people who did get tickets in the lottery those people may or may not include marco
Marco:
I did, in fact, get a ticket in the lottery.
Casey:
Which is extremely exciting.
Casey:
And I actually did as well, which I'm very excited about.
Casey:
And I am very, very sad, John, that you did not get a ticket.
Casey:
I really wish that all three of us did.
Casey:
And who knows, maybe the WWDC fairy will sprinkle a ticket on you some way, somehow.
Casey:
But yeah, that is the situation.
Casey:
So for those of you who had asked, that's the deal.
Casey:
Any other thoughts on that from the two of you?
John:
It's pretty good, like two out of three.
John:
Two out of the three hosts got tickets in the lottery.
John:
That seems pretty good in the grand scheme of things.
Marco:
Yeah, it does seem like... I mean, last year, there was, as you mentioned last time, there was a system last year where you could enter from multiple developer accounts, and you could enter if you weren't really that sure if you wanted to go.
Marco:
You just wanted to see maybe, oh, maybe I'll get the opportunity to buy a ticket.
Marco:
This year, you had to commit to buy one, and they would charge you to give it to you.
John:
Oh, we should talk about that, too, because that is heartbreaking for the people who...
John:
uh won the lottery and apple tried to charge their card oh yeah and didn't and got the chart the charge didn't work because their credit card company like flagged it as fraud or whatever and in many cases immediately called the people and said hey uh some company just tried to charge your card sixteen hundred dollars uh we blocked it do you want to let the charge through and they'd be like yes yes let the charge through but it was too late apple didn't moved on and gave their ticket to someone else i'm pretty sure that didn't happen to me but that would have just broken my heart even more
Casey:
Yeah, to Marco's point, I know that happened to Swilliams, and he handled it much better than I would have, but he was pretty upset about it.
Casey:
I would have been just freaking devastated.
Casey:
And it's funny because I don't remember if I told the story on the show, but suffice it to say, during the registration process, even though I didn't read the part where it says, oh, you're going to be insta-charged if you win—
Casey:
I did read something which I couldn't find when I went back to look for it.
Casey:
So I feel like it was during the process of registering that I saw it.
Casey:
But anyway, it said, you should probably warn your bank that this is going to happen because we are reserving the right to just punt you if your card is declined.
Casey:
And so I saw that and I immediately called Bank of America.
Casey:
And yes, before you write me, I understand that you hate Bank of America and they screwed you.
Casey:
I get it.
Marco:
Bank of America sucks.
Marco:
Vinyl sucks.
Casey:
I know that.
Casey:
This is not the year of Casey, apparently.
Marco:
It's an all out attack on Casey right now.
Marco:
It is.
Marco:
Wait till we talk about the white shirt.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
So anyway, so I called Bank of America.
Casey:
And this is actually the first not awesome experience I've had with the second not awesome experience I've had with Bank of America.
Casey:
And I called them and I said, hey, you know, I'd like to preauthorize this charge.
Casey:
So it goes through blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
And they said, that's lovely, but we don't preauthorize things.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Now it turned out that I did win the lottery.
Casey:
I did get Insta charged and it did go through, which was slightly surprising because just a couple of years ago, I don't remember which one it was.
Casey:
Um, I did have the WWDC ticket, um, declined originally.
Casey:
I think this might've been the last year of the mad rush or no, I'm sorry.
Casey:
The next last year of the mad rush.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
and you know they called me and said do you want this yes yes for the love of god yes let it go through and um and so i was scared this year but apparently it all worked out but for swilliams he had we had talked briefly he and i and i believe he said he had pretty much instantly just like marco was there money you said had instantly said yes let the charge through and apple had already moved on it was already too late tough noogies and that i understand that but
Casey:
Gosh, that's stinky, man.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't understand that.
John:
I say, you know, give it a window of time, maybe even 24 hours.
John:
It's like it doesn't need to all it's not as if there's a race for this all to be settled.
John:
Like we need to have all the tickets given to someone.
John:
And it's like if they won the lottery and they got picked, give it 20 or four hours for the charge to go through.
John:
I think that's reasonable.
John:
Something like that, because moving on immediately is just, you know, because I didn't.
John:
I didn't call to pre-authorize.
John:
I'm pretty sure that wasn't the problem.
John:
I never saw any charges on the card and never got any calls about any charges being rejected.
John:
I just didn't win the lottery, period.
John:
But if I did, I would be super upset.
John:
I don't feel like that's a great way to do this.
John:
Again, it's not like they were in a rush.
John:
24 hours is fine.
John:
And for those people who won the lottery and then lost it, man, I mean, I guess it makes someone else happy because their ticket went to somebody else who previously wouldn't have won the lottery, but it's just...
Marco:
Boy, that's a bummer.
Marco:
It's a pretty crappy way to lose.
Marco:
And yeah, you know, what Casey said, you know, they did warn you on the pigs during the buying process.
Marco:
They told you this is what would happen.
John:
Just because they say that doesn't mean there's anything you can do to stop the stupid credit card company.
John:
Sometimes you can call them and say, please, just please let this through.
John:
And they'll be like, either we can't do this or be like, oh, yeah, sure.
John:
We'll totally let that through and they'll reject it anyway.
John:
Like, it's not like there's a human there approving this charge.
John:
It's just a bunch of algorithms.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Like...
John:
Maybe you're picking the wrong card.
John:
I may change which card is attached to my Apple ID to one that gets used more frequently so that this charge wouldn't look so strange on it or whatever.
John:
But anyway, save that for next year.
Marco:
I would say that was the one aspect of this that didn't feel fair.
Marco:
The rest of it felt very fair, very nicely run.
Marco:
It was executed well.
Marco:
The whole rest of it I thought was great.
Marco:
But the credit card fraud thing, I think that was the one part that is just kind of crappy for people.
Casey:
Yeah, it really is.
Casey:
You could have left a 24-hour grace period for them to register and still had time, if it didn't work out, to give other people the ticket and still made it by the promised time of 5 in the evening on Monday Pacific time.
Casey:
So it is a major bummer.
Casey:
And God, do I feel terrible for Swilliams and the other people who had this happen to them.
Casey:
But I agree with you, Marco, that all told, and I like to think I would say this even if I didn't get a ticket—
John:
this was probably about as fair as they could have made it and and like i said for the first volumes and people who got like it just feels bad because you know that happened but the bottom line is his ticket went to somebody else who otherwise wouldn't have gotten one so that person it's in the end it is simply a random distribution of people it's just as a little bit of non-randomness and like though if you got rejected like it's as if some participants never could have won right
Marco:
I also would say that it does seem just totally anecdotally, it does seem like a larger proportion of people who applied got them this year than last year, indicating that the whole multiple submissions thing from last year versus this year's commission or committing thing seems to have helped.
John:
Yeah, I would love to know what are the odds of two out of three of us getting it, because I feel like they did not give tickets to two thirds of the applicants.
Casey:
Yeah, that's true.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Also, a real-time follow-up from Steckert.
Casey:
He or she said, there's no such thing as a pre-authorization, only an authorization.
Casey:
An authorization needs a payee.
Casey:
And then they continued, and this is interesting, here's how Apple could do it better.
Casey:
In the WWDC app, or perhaps in the store app, let people do an Apple Pay to authorize the payment and then only commit the transaction if and only if they win the lottery.
John:
Yeah, that's what I was saying last week was what we would do in e-commerce.
John:
You do an auth for the amount at the time they do the thing, but you don't do the settled part of it where you actually take the money from them.
John:
Like auth doesn't do anything.
John:
It just says, yes, you're authorized to pay this amount to this, but like do the testing at that point.
John:
You'd still be in the same situation of like when you're clicking through the thing.
John:
If they tried to do the auth and they got rejected and then your credit card company called you, like what would be happening then?
John:
Would you still be in the flow of clicking through?
John:
Would it send you back to the page or would it just be like, sorry, we tried to authorize it and we couldn't?
John:
Now you can never go through this process again.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I mean, it's you have to think about what their goals are.
John:
But this is they're tweaking the system.
John:
Hopefully they'll tweak it again next year.
John:
Maybe some people are saying in the chat room, the people whose card got charged and then got rejected and then didn't get a ticket.
John:
Maybe they have some recourse to say, look, Apple, I won the lottery, but my card got denied and I approved it.
John:
is there anything you can do i don't know i haven't heard about anybody successfully doing that who didn't get their uh ticket because their card was rejected but anyway we can't all be winners that's that's life wow that's super chipper um and then a final uh bit of follow-up just to remind everyone that atp shirts are indeed available
Casey:
There have been a lot of people who have already bought them, which we are all extremely thankful for.
Casey:
And that is very kind of all of you, Marco or John.
Casey:
I'm not sure which one of you happens to have this up.
Casey:
But do you want to talk about speaking of shaming Casey?
Casey:
Do you want to talk about what the breakdown is of shirts thus far?
Marco:
Yeah, sure.
Marco:
I mean, so you can go in the campaigns, you can see this is not private information.
Marco:
If you just go to each one of the campaigns, you can see how many we've sold.
Marco:
And so the regular shirt, the middle one, we've sold about 600.
Marco:
The sport, we've sold 216.
Marco:
And the edition, we've sold 108.
Marco:
What's interesting and the reason why I think Apple made the Apple Watch edition is that even though we have sold roughly a sixth as many editions we've sold the regular ones, it's making almost half the profit compared to the regular ones.
John:
So that's why the edition exists in the Apple Watch lineup, I'm pretty sure.
John:
And the edition is much more than like our edition is twice the price of the shirt.
John:
The Apple Watch edition is more than twice the price of the Apple Watch.
John:
Yeah, by a lot.
John:
So we don't know what's going to do to their demand curve.
John:
At a certain point, you get diminishing returns.
John:
Apparently, a lot of people are willing to pay $50 for a t-shirt with gold-colored foil on it.
Marco:
The reason we didn't charge more... I got a couple people saying you should have charged more, and we thought about it for the joke value.
Marco:
I think it would have been funnier if we charged more, but...
Marco:
The reason we didn't is because we knew some people would buy it.
Marco:
And I didn't want to be responsible for somebody having spent like $100 or $200 on a t-shirt.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Like we would be doing it like how high can we price it?
John:
Like would it be funny to price it so high that we know nobody's going to buy it?
John:
Or like the three people would buy it.
John:
And bottom line, I'm going to buy one of these edition things, too.
John:
I'm going to buy one of my wife.
John:
So I'm buying my own stupid $50 t-shirt myself.
Marco:
I bought two.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
One for me, one for Tiff, and one each of the regular, the shirt edition as well.
Marco:
Or not the edition.
Marco:
Oh, the collection.
Marco:
God, these terms.
John:
So the loser shirt out of this.
John:
You gave the breakdowns for ATP Shirt, ATP Shirt Sport, and ATP Shirt Edition.
John:
But remember that ATP Shirt Sport comes in two different styles that have two different ink colors on it, and that...
John:
teespring requires two separate campaigns if you have two different colors so atp shirt sport comes in blue for a men's version and white for a women's version and the white women's atp shirt sport has sold a grand total of three and for the first few days it sold zero yeah it's all zero for a long time is it because it's white and people don't like white is it because a lot of women don't want an atp shirt or don't listen to the show uh
John:
uh we i don't think we can get a breakdown there's women's versions of all the other shirts as well i don't think we can get a breakdown of how many of those are sold maybe when it's over we can find out but yeah that white sport shirt is just not popular it has sold three which means that they're going to print it because i think three is the minimum so the people the three lonely people who ordered the white women's shirt you will get your shirts but boy not a good seller
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So here's the thing, kids.
Casey:
If you want to continue to encourage Marco to think that he's always right about everything, don't buy white shirts.
Casey:
But if you'd like Marco to be taken down a peg, do me a favor.
Casey:
Do all of us a favor.
Casey:
Buy yourself a white shirt.
John:
And it's a white women's shirt, by the way.
John:
So feel free to buy it.
John:
You don't have to be a woman to buy it, but be aware of what you're buying.
Marco:
Okay, our second sponsor this week is Squarespace, the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website, portfolio, and or online store.
Marco:
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Marco:
Squarespace has tons and tons of features.
Marco:
I can't fit them all into one ad read, but let me just say, if you're building a website, chances are they have what you need.
Marco:
They have, of course, blogs, galleries, portfolios, pages, all sorts of maps, sidebars, I mean, everything.
Marco:
You can put a store in your page.
Marco:
You can have images.
Marco:
You can upload your own images.
Marco:
You can buy images from Getty Images right there in the interface.
Marco:
It is so nice.
Marco:
All this stuff, if you're designing a site, if you're writing a site...
Marco:
Look, everyone who listens to this show knows there are other options to how to create a web page.
Marco:
But the reason you use Squarespace is because you just get so much built in for no additional cost, for free, time-wise.
Marco:
You get so much functionality in there that you don't have to build or configure someone else's system with plugins and everything else.
Marco:
You don't have to keep anything updated.
Marco:
You don't have to modify the design when new devices come out to try to fit the device because now all the designs are responsive.
Marco:
You get so much built in here that you don't have to worry about.
Marco:
It's also great if you're the techie guy and someone else needs a site and they ask you to help them build a site.
Marco:
Just send them here because...
Marco:
You know they'll have everything here.
Marco:
And Squarespace supports it, so you don't have to.
Marco:
It is great.
Marco:
Our site is hosted on Squarespace.
Marco:
Can't say enough good things about Squarespace for both making sites for yourself or for making sites for other people or for directing other people to make their own sites and leave you alone.
Marco:
It is so great for all of these things.
Marco:
They are doing a special thing.
Marco:
This is kind of last minute because this ends April 30th.
Marco:
But if you hurry up, if you apply to work there as an engineer...
Marco:
If you're asked to interview before April 30th, they're doing this thing where they're here in New York City and they are proud to be in New York.
Marco:
So they created this thing called NY Commit, which will select up to 10 engineers from across America who apply and get accepted before April 30th for an interview to experience the history, vibrancy and diversity of Squarespace's home here in New York City.
Marco:
If you're asked to interview by 30th, they will bring you and your spouse or partner on a complimentary weekend in New York City.
Marco:
And they'll show you how the city inspires them to help build beautiful websites.
Marco:
Learn more at nycommit.com for New York Commit, NY Commit.
Marco:
Anyway, Squarespace is awesome.
Marco:
Give it a try if you're building a website.
Marco:
You really should.
Marco:
Trust me, it is so much better than trying to set up a CMS yourself or especially trying to have somebody else set up a CMS for themselves.
Marco:
Oh, it's so much better.
Marco:
So check it out.
Marco:
Squarespace.com.
Marco:
Use offer code ATP.
Marco:
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Marco:
You can set up a real free trial and there is no credit card required.
Marco:
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Marco:
The only thing you can't do is put your domain name on it.
Marco:
everything else is fully functional actually i think even that works i think it'll just show like a little welcome page anyway you can do so much with the free trial you can do pretty much everything go set it up today just so you can see what i'm talking about you can see how good it is for yourself squarespace.com enter offer code atp when you finally decide to buy it and that will give you 10 off thanks a lot to squarespace for sponsoring our show once again squarespace start here go anywhere
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So we put off for the last week or two, but the time has come.
John:
We should probably talk about photos for OS X. I realized listening to last week's show that we keep talking about photos.
John:
And we mean the application whose name is photos that also happens to deal with photos.
John:
And, you know, when I'm saying it, sometimes I'm saying it with a capital P. Sometimes we're saying it with a lowercase b. It's another great name from the company that brought you the mail application that's called Mail.
John:
And the notes application is called notes and the calendar that's called calendar and yes, so on and so forth.
Casey:
It'd be like naming a magazine the magazine.
John:
Yeah, seriously.
John:
So anyway, who among us has been using photos for anything other than launching the empty application with nothing in it?
John:
I have.
John:
Casey?
Casey:
Nope.
Casey:
Really?
Casey:
Have you imported anything into it?
Casey:
No?
Casey:
Nope.
Casey:
Nope.
Casey:
I have not touched it.
Casey:
Every time it comes up, when I put in my SD card for my camera, I immediately quit and walk away.
John:
Well, so you have launched it, though, then.
Casey:
Well, it's launched itself.
Casey:
I haven't knowingly done it.
Casey:
The reason I haven't touched it is because I've heard just barely enough horror stories that I don't want to go anywhere near it.
Casey:
And I suspect that the horror stories are one in a million.
Casey:
I suspect that in some, but not all cases, it was user error.
Casey:
But actually just earlier today, Stephen Hackett was talking to all of us about how he was having some problems with it.
Casey:
And yes, I could back up everything 35 more times, but it's just...
Casey:
This is not a problem that I have in my life that I feel like photos should or could solve.
John:
So what are you using instead then?
Casey:
So in terms of backup, I have photos on my personal machine.
Casey:
I have them duplicated.
Casey:
to the Synology, and then also Time Machine and Crash Plan and Picture Life.
Casey:
And so between all of those things, I have it, I hope, pretty well covered.
Casey:
And I freaking love Picture Life.
Casey:
It's very much like Everpix was before it passed away.
Casey:
Let it rest in peace.
Casey:
And picture life does everything I think I need.
Casey:
So I'm going to be listening very intently.
Casey:
No sarcasm intended, because I would be curious to hear what photos would do that picture life wouldn't do for me.
John:
So you just have the pictures and folders and there's no Mac application?
Casey:
That's correct.
John:
So how do you like look at your, after you take your pictures on your camera, you plug your camera into your computer, it slurps them all down to the whatever picture life.
John:
But like, do you get to see them or do anything with them?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So, so the workflow is I put the SD card in the computer.
Casey:
I go through and I don't, it's extremely rare that I do any sort of post-processing, but I'll go through and I'll delete the ones that I know are just crap.
Casey:
I'll delete any raw files that I think I'll never need again and will inevitably regret having deleted the
Casey:
And then I will run them through a script that I tweaked that Dr. Drang wrote that will file them into folders by year, then month, and then rename the files so they're named by entire date, including timestamp.
Casey:
The only other thing I'll do that's even vaguely like post-processing is I have some scripts, which I believe I again stole from Dr. Drang, that will add geolocation information to them.
Casey:
But basically what I do is I go through them, delete the ones I don't want, add geotags if I need to, and then have the script slurp them and file them away.
Casey:
And then Picture Life automatically finds them and uploads them.
John:
So when do you look at them?
John:
Do you look at them after Picture Life pulls them up?
John:
Do you open the Picture Life app on your phone or something or go to the website?
Casey:
No, I mean, I could.
Casey:
But generally speaking, I look at them as I'm going through all of them to see which ones I want, which ones I don't want.
John:
What do you mean as you're going through it?
John:
Like in the Finder?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Using QuickLuck to look at them?
Casey:
That's right.
John:
I mean, geez.
John:
Yeah, I guess I guess it'll work.
Casey:
I mean, I'm not saying this is the right way of doing things.
Casey:
And please, I don't I'm not looking for any answers other than this app.
Casey:
So whatever you're going to recommend, I appreciate it.
Casey:
But it's OK.
Casey:
I'm OK the way it is.
Casey:
But I am curious to hear what photos would do for me.
Casey:
And I'm not saying you won't.
Casey:
I'm not saying that sarcastically.
Casey:
I mean that genuinely.
Casey:
I'm curious to hear what photos would do for me to make this experience better.
Marco:
Yeah, that's fair.
Marco:
I mean, it really depends a lot on how you want to browse your photos.
Marco:
I mean, for me, my big problem that I've always had with photo apps is that you had to choose good performance, good editing controls, and integration with iOS devices.
Marco:
And you had to choose between those things.
Marco:
And you couldn't have all three of those.
Marco:
You could have at most two.
Marco:
You know, kind of like the project management triangle.
Marco:
Like, you could have at most two.
Marco:
And Photos actually hits all three.
Marco:
And it is the first thing to have good iOS integration.
Marco:
iPhoto and Aperture never did.
Marco:
PhotoStream was never good.
Marco:
PhotoStream was always like a half solution that was almost dangerous in how much it didn't cover and how it didn't work.
Marco:
PhotoStream was just a nightmare of confusion and misled expectations of how it worked and what it did and what it didn't do.
Marco:
This is the solution, but the photo app, we'll talk about the app separately in a second, but just the whole concept of the photos in the cloud thing, I think that this is the cloud photo service that we have been begging Apple to make.
Marco:
Because we knew that no one else could really have the integration into iOS devices the way Apple does.
Marco:
And we've been begging Apple to make this for years, and we all thought they never would.
Marco:
And then they did.
Marco:
And it seems like the cloud component actually works pretty well.
Marco:
I mean, I too have heard a couple of horror stories here and there, but it sounds like the problem is not in the cloud necessarily.
Marco:
It's either like, you know, Stephen's story sounds like the app corrupted itself a little bit, its local database.
Casey:
Yeah, I think so.
Marco:
I've heard a couple of people who said that the import didn't import some large chunk of their files.
Marco:
And those are both serious problems for sure.
Marco:
But those are very unlikely to be cloud related.
Marco:
So I think it's safe to say so far with what we've seen.
Marco:
So far, it looks like the cloud part of this is quite good, actually.
Marco:
It seems to be working.
Marco:
And it's all built on Azure and Amazon Web Services and stuff, as far as we know.
Marco:
So it should scale properly.
Marco:
It should scale okay.
Marco:
I mean, there's already tons of people importing massive back catalogs of photos into it all within the last couple of weeks, so within a short time.
Marco:
And it seems to be doing pretty well.
Marco:
So overall, it seems like the cloud part is fine.
Marco:
It seems like the cloud part works.
Marco:
And that's impressive.
Marco:
That's a very, very impressive accomplishment right there.
Marco:
We'll talk about the pricing in a bit.
Marco:
But functionally, it seems like the cloud part works.
Marco:
The app...
Marco:
is certainly up for debate.
Marco:
I would say this is definitely not a replacement for Aperture.
Marco:
The way that Apple kind of wedged it and said, oh, well, we're going to stop working on Aperture now, even though we were kind of never really working on it that much, but we're going to stop working on it for real this time.
Marco:
And that's less good for Aperture users.
Marco:
I'm coming from Lightroom, and I used to use Aperture, and then before that, I used iPhoto.
Marco:
And what I always wanted in iPhoto is just the nice, simple management that iPhoto offers.
Marco:
I never wanted the really complicated filing system and management and keywording and everything.
Marco:
I never wanted that part of what Aperture offered or Lightroom.
Marco:
I really just wanted iPhoto with better editing controls.
Marco:
And that's what this is.
Marco:
That's what it feels like.
Marco:
A total rewrite of iPhoto for the new generation of everything.
Marco:
It's like iPhoto X or 10, however you pronounce it for software like this.
Marco:
That's not the operating system.
Marco:
It does feel like that.
Marco:
It's the modern version of iPhoto.
Marco:
with really good editing controls and it does things that i wouldn't have guessed they would have done like for example it it is doing lossless editing on those adjustments and then it syncs the adjustment values to your ios devices so you can like adjust the brightness on one device and then you can like go to a different device and keep adjusting the brightness and it's it's basing it on the same base image it isn't like baking it into the image or making a copy and doing that like it's doing it properly it's doing what you what you would want it to do
Marco:
So from all that perspective, this seems like exactly what I wanted.
Marco:
And so far, I've used it very little so far.
Marco:
I imported my whole library, but I've done very little editing in it.
Marco:
I browsed a little bit.
Marco:
The browsing interface is nice.
Marco:
I have some wish list items here and there for different views or sorting options or whatever, but for the most part, it's minor stuff.
Marco:
Overall, I'm pretty impressed with it.
Marco:
It seems like they took a very big problem that nobody has fully solved and solved it in exactly the way that is probably going to be best for me at least and probably a lot of other people.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So are you going to ever give it a shot, you think, or are you going to wait a long time, if ever?
Casey:
I think I'm going to wait between a medium and a long time.
Casey:
I did hear, and I heard a couple of horror stories, which were like 12th hand information about large deletions that happened.
Casey:
Again, when you have as many customers as Apple does, this is inevitably going to happen.
Casey:
No software is perfect.
Casey:
But especially since I'm a new dad, I and even though I have all my photos and what did I say, quadruplicate or whatever, I just I really I'm scared to mess with.
Casey:
to mess with this stuff.
Casey:
And additionally, one of the things that I've made a critical part of my workflow, which is what I described earlier by tagging or geotagging all my pictures that are taken with my Micro Four Thirds camera,
Casey:
Part of the reason I've done that is because PictureLife does a really good job of allowing you to search for photos by location.
Casey:
And I believe it was on Connected that they said that it isn't possible to geotag pictures today with the Photos app, I don't think.
Casey:
Obviously, I've not used it, so this is me going out on a limb, but I believe that's what they said.
Marco:
i think that's right but i mean again this is this is a 1.0 really like it is officially like you know the next version of iPhoto and Averter but really it's it's a 1.0 it feels like a total ground-up rewrite uh so it it would not surprise me if things like and and it will obey geotags that are already embedded in the files but it won't let you modify them afterwards and and you know that's the kind of thing i can see them changing later you know adding a feature later so that's that's not a huge deal for me and
Marco:
Also, most of the photos I shoot are with my iPhone anyway, so it's already geotagged.
Marco:
So, you know, again, it depends on how you use it.
Marco:
And one thing I like about it from a paranoia perspective is when we first heard about this app, you know, almost a year ago, I tell you what you see last year, when we first heard about it, we talked about it on the show, and I had expressed a concern of, you know, I don't want...
Marco:
I don't want the only master copies to be in the cloud.
Marco:
I want a local app that just has files sitting in the file system that I can then back up and I can restore if necessary or adjust.
Marco:
And that's what this offers.
Marco:
It is very similar to iPhoto in that it has a package, which is just a directory,
Marco:
It has a package that inside that package of its database is just all your files.
Marco:
And they're not organized in any particularly useful way, but they're all there.
Marco:
And so if you ever had to reorganize them, you could organize them by their exif dates and it'd be fine.
Marco:
So that is all there.
Marco:
I imported things into it by dumping a bunch of files on it.
Marco:
There's nothing saying I couldn't do the same thing again if I ever had to start fresh.
Marco:
If something ever got corrupted, I had to delete all of my photos from iCloud and start over again.
Marco:
It looks like I'd be able to do that just fine with my regular backup system that I have.
Marco:
And I have this Mac sitting here with all the files on it.
Marco:
It also gives me the options it has for reducing local disk space usage.
Marco:
That is really interesting from a backup perspective because you could, for instance, have a Mac mini in your house somewhere in your closet or somewhere or at work that has enough disk space on it that you could have that be a second client and have that backup your entire library to itself.
Marco:
And then maybe on your main computer, if you get a new computer with an SSD in it, that maybe you don't have enough space for all your photos or you don't want to buy the terabyte SSD for a thousand bucks or whatever.
Marco:
then maybe you can have your main computer not have all the originals on it.
Marco:
And you have some other Mac that is logged in and is backed up in its own way, like with Backblazer or whatever, have that logged in and be backed up somewhere else that can have a big slow disk in it and have that not be part of your main computer anymore.
Marco:
I can see that especially being helpful for laptop users.
Marco:
So the options this gives you for geeks like us who want control over the files are actually pretty good.
Casey:
Yeah, I am impressed by them.
Casey:
And one of the things that makes me want to try it, as much as I am very reticent to do so, is I am probably going to be upgrading my three- or four-year-old personal machine, which is a 15-inch high-res machine.
Casey:
macbook pro um i'm looking at upgrading that to probably a new 15 inch machine sometime soon and this thing has i think a 750 gig hard drive in it and i don't have an overabundance of free space on it and that's in part because i have all 118 gigs of photos and videos as per picture life on it and
Casey:
And it does sound really awesome to be able to buy a computer that maybe doesn't have a tremendous SSD in it, yet still have access to all my photos as though they were there.
Casey:
And I would choose a strategy much like what you're saying, Marco.
Casey:
I'd probably leave the one I have today, downloading all of them and operating as a backup, and then have my main machine just grab whatever one's photo sees fit.
Casey:
So in terms of what they're promising, it genuinely does sound really, really good.
Casey:
And I am very impressed by it.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Do we want to talk about pricing or John?
Casey:
You've been very quiet.
Casey:
Do you have thoughts about this?
John:
I was just listening to what you guys were doing.
John:
I think I talked about this before, like that I was going to be cautious about this.
John:
I didn't install any of the betas.
John:
I didn't enable iCloud photo library when that was in beta and iOS or anything like that.
John:
I just stayed away from it.
John:
But when all the reviews came out for the Photos app, I read all of them and talked to some of the people who wrote them and asked questions and investigated.
John:
And the thing that made me decide to when the official version was released to dive in and do it and import my real library was the way that it does the imports.
John:
If you have an existing iPhoto library, it will like I have an existing iPhoto library.
John:
It's on an external 500 gig SSD.
John:
the library itself is around 260 270 gigs I can't duplicate that library and still fit on the disk but the way it does it if you have an existing library is it doesn't duplicate the files it just makes hard links to all the files which does not increase the disk space for them it just references them and once you do that once you do a full import
John:
uh a it should go faster because it's not actually copying 260 gigs of memory it's just making a bunch of hard links and writing a bunch of metadata or whatever and b after you do that you've got your iPhoto library still completely unmodified you could launch iPhoto and it would still just be right there and you've got your photos library which in the beginning is an exact copy of your iPhoto library with some other caveats I'll get to in a little bit um and then if you start using Photos
John:
You will slowly diverge.
John:
The photos library will start changing.
John:
You'll add new photos to it.
John:
You'll make modifications.
John:
Those modifications won't be reflected in the iPhoto library.
John:
If I was to go back in time and modify a picture from three years ago, I would get a private copy.
John:
It's copy on write.
John:
I would get a private copy in the photos library.
John:
So the way this is done, the fact that I don't have to double my disk space, that I can start from where I left off in iPhotos and that I could essentially bail at any time.
John:
Just sort of I would like export the photos that I imported into the Photos app after the transfer process and then throw away the Photos library and then just reimport those into iPhoto if I wanted to go back.
John:
What Casey doesn't have to deal with, but what I have to deal with is the idea that, you know, iPhoto is gone.
John:
iPhoto is dead.
John:
I used iPhoto since its introduction as my way to deal with photos with a couple of brief side trips into Aperture when it could read your iPhoto library and stuff.
John:
And I looked at Lightroom and stuff like that, but...
John:
i have an investment in this in this program and metadata and everything and if it's dead i need to get on the thing that that is going to replace it and sooner is better than later and i have a lot of problems with live photo it's just it it it is really on its last leg so i was hoping that photos would solve these problems for me so i did the import it was a little bit weird because what it initially does it wants to make a new photos library
John:
um and it wants to make it on my main disc and that's no good because this is on the macbook air and it's got a tiny little ssd in it so i had to dissuade it from you know i had to make it open a new library delete the little library that it made and then i had to make the the second library like you launch with the option key down and pick a different library i had to make that the quote unquote system library because if you don't do that then all of your photo stream stuff will only go into the system library so for a little while i had like
John:
my external library on the external drive but the the system library was that new little empty one that's where all the streams are going so that was a little bit confusing i don't i'm not confusing like i i could figure out what was going on but i figure if someone else was using this they would be confused about why they're not getting anyway maybe they want to have multiple drives but bottom line is i could get to the point where i wanted it
John:
I imported my library, which took a really, really, really long time, way longer than I thought it should take since it's not actually copying the data.
John:
And during it, it's like, while you wait, why not take a tour of the photos application?
John:
And there's no way in hell I was clicking that thing to take a tour of the photos.
John:
Like, I'm not touching this computer until it's done importing.
John:
I didn't want to do anything to perturb the program.
John:
I don't know what kind of slideshow introduction thing is going to do, but that is the last thing I want is that to crash the app when it's in the middle of my import.
John:
So...
John:
Did you open any other windows?
John:
Uh, no, just like, just let it sit there and it took just a tremendous amount of time.
John:
This is not uploading to iCloud.
John:
Forget about iCloud.
John:
This is just merely like importing my photos library.
John:
So it's like 67,000 photos or something, 260, 270 gigs.
John:
There are some videos mixed in there, but not too many.
John:
Um,
John:
So I let it do all that.
John:
And then the next thing was, like, if there's settings that Marco was talking about, you can say, do you want me to keep all the photos on your Mac?
John:
Yes, I definitely did, because it's the whole point.
John:
Like, I want them to be there.
John:
I want them to get backed up and all that other stuff.
John:
The interesting thing was that Time Machine, I think, was smart enough
John:
not to like time machine knows that they're hard links it understands them or whatever so it's not as if time machine's like oh my goodness i have 260 new gigs to back up no it doesn't it doesn't have it just you know the the the used space on my external disk did not grow up go up by that much it just had like its little database and the metadata and stuff and then the photos as they were so the time machine backup caught up pretty quickly um
John:
And I turned on the iCloud thing.
John:
Of course, I had to buy more iCloud storage and we'll talk about storage pricing in a little bit.
John:
I did that.
John:
I bought enough storage to fit all my stuff, which is I bought 500 gigs of storage and then I let it upload and the uploading.
John:
It's a weird, like it shows a progress bar on the preferences window, but every time I launched the preferences window, the progress bar started from zero kind of.
John:
And the other part of it that wasn't in the preferences window said uploading, you know, X thousand photos.
John:
In the beginning, it said uploading 67,000 photos and the number would go down and then it would say uploading 50,000, uploading 49,000.
John:
Like that's a weird way to show progress.
John:
Like I understand what it's getting at, but what's wrong with a progress bar guys?
John:
Like, you know, if you didn't know that it started at 60,000, you wouldn't know you were half done when it said uploading 30,000.
John:
Anyway, took like two days to upload all my photos.
John:
It was not using all of my connection.
John:
And this has been a big complaint with people who have smaller upload pipes that the photos app will just use as much upload bandwidth as you have.
John:
And like if you saturate your upload bandwidth, it makes your experience doing anything else really miserable.
John:
um there is an option in preferences to say stop uploading it's like pause for a day is the only button but like that's not a great option if it's noon and the thing is destroying your upload pipe and you do pause for a day all you've done is scheduled for it to destroy your upload pipe tomorrow at noon um again i didn't have that problem because it was not using my entire upload pipe not even close i think i have like 35 megabits up
John:
and it was maybe using two, three, or four.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I guess I could figure it out.
John:
It took about 48 hours to go.
John:
It was not even.
John:
Sometimes it went really fast.
John:
Sometimes it went slow.
John:
I've heard from people who have looked at the traffic going over the wire that it was uploading directly to Amazon S3, like not going to Apple servers.
John:
It was going to somethings3.amazon.com, which is fine.
John:
I don't care where the hell it is.
John:
As long as it's uploaded somewhere, I don't need to know the implementation details.
John:
For people wondering, I have heard reports of that, but I didn't check it myself.
John:
After it uploaded everything, I had to look at like, what has it done to my iPhoto library?
John:
Because I put a lot of time into my iPhoto library.
John:
I talked about my rating system and my keywording.
John:
You know, I keyword for people in my family.
John:
I do ratings as a series of filtering.
John:
Three stars or higher are the good ones.
John:
Anything below that is bad.
John:
One star is usually should be deleted.
John:
Very few four and five stars.
John:
i'm not surprised at all me neither it's a fresh it's exactly the same thing i do for itunes it's more of a thresholding system uh like you know i want to see like what are the good photos if for example we're making a calendar which we do like we use those websites let you make a calendar with pictures of your family on it right i immediately go to pictures from last year three stars or more those are like the good ones like those are the ones even worth looking at and then the one star is periodically when i get space tight i just go let me show let me see all the one stars and i'll delete them well
John:
uh photos doesn't do that photos has favorite or not favorite a favorite uses a star not favorite has no star so it is a very binary filtering system which is kind of in keeping with how i was using it like the three star was the threshold so how the hell does it import my library where they were all rated well
John:
It still has keywords and it makes a one star keyword.
John:
It says like one space star, two space star.
John:
Those are keywords.
John:
And it puts keywords on all my one, two and three star rated ones, which is fine because then it still lets me sort by one, two and three star.
John:
But now I have to make a choice.
John:
I could continue rating them one, two and three star by using the one, two, three, four and five star keywords.
John:
Or I could just abandon that and just go with the favoring system.
John:
And I've decided that I'm just going to go forward and use it the favoring system.
John:
So what I basically did was took anything that is three, four or five stars and put a put a an official photos fave on it.
John:
And that's what I'm going to do going forward.
John:
I'll leave the keyword ratings on all the other ones, but I'm not going to try to maintain my.
John:
one through five which means i won't really have a good way to i guess i could still label the one star ones one star if i wanted but uh you should just delete them yeah i mean that's what basically i do like there aren't really many one stars in there like one star means like it's out of focus or something and they eventually get deleted so there's not really many of them hanging around like when i go through i basically delete all the one star or i decide to upgrade one of the two i think well it's not that bad or whatever
John:
Um, so the import went okay.
John:
Some of my smart albums didn't quite work because some of the smart albums, like it doesn't have, you know, to do like nested logic, like where you can make a smart thing and then have another thing references another smart thing.
John:
It doesn't have like nested Boolean logic.
John:
It just has one level of logic.
John:
And some of my smart albums didn't work because the, the logic required, required a feature that only existed in iPhone.
John:
So I lost a little bit, but my manual albums worked and my simple smart albums were reported over correctly.
John:
The faces were more or less parted over the keywords.
John:
Um,
John:
So that went okay.
John:
The upload went okay.
John:
But here's where the rubber really hits the road with this app.
John:
The problem I had with iPhoto was that it basically came down to, at this point, performance, in all aspects of performance.
John:
The app took a year and a day to launch.
John:
You'd launch it.
John:
This is all SSD, keep in mind.
John:
This is a very fast external SSD connected with FireWire 800 or an internal SSD.
John:
It didn't matter.
John:
Took forever to launch.
John:
You'd sit there and see a spinner for a long time.
John:
Might as well just go away, come back later.
John:
Once it launched, pretty much everything you did in the app was slow.
John:
Scrolling was slow.
John:
The thing I most commonly do is basically you plug in a camera, import photos.
John:
After I import photos, I want to go through them and rate them and keyword them or whatever, basically just to look at them.
John:
go to full screen mode because i figure that'll be easier on the application full screen not to worry about anything else use the arrow key to advance from one photo to the next use keyboard shortcuts to put to to rate them and stuff like that that workflow right arrow command r to rotate command 2 command 3 command 4 to rate right arrow
John:
It was just so incredibly sluggish, like super slow.
John:
Going into full screen mode was slow.
John:
Hitting the right arrow to go to the next photo seemed like it took a seven second delay sometimes.
John:
It's like, what are you even doing?
John:
Sometimes the photo would come in and it was still blurry and then it would put in the full res.
John:
Super slow.
John:
So I'm like, everyone says photos is great.
John:
It should be way faster.
John:
Keywording, like I do command one, command two, command three, or you can only keyword if you weren't in full screen mode and you have the keyword palette available.
John:
Then you do single keystrokes of like F for family.
John:
And like you'd select a bunch of photos, you'd click one, shift click on another, hit F for family.
John:
And like three seconds later, the UI would catch up with you like, oh, you shift clicked.
John:
OK, I'll select this range.
John:
Oh, I'll make a little keyword thing flash on the screen.
John:
It just felt like molasses.
John:
So this is what I was hoping photos aside from all the cloud stuff.
John:
I was hoping that it would help the workflow of like the things that I do.
John:
Import photos, go through them, rate them, keyword them or just go through them and browse.
John:
um and i guess scrolling but i do a little bit less scrolling so i set everything up in photos and one of the first things i did was grab the little scroll bar and scrolled up and down that works all right 67 000 photos you don't expect it to be that fast keep in mind this is a 2011 macbook air with four gigs of ram so that probably doesn't help oh my gosh yeah but uh but it did all right like i'm willing to give to give it a pass for like things that i think uh that a lack of ram you know explains um
John:
So I imported some photos into it and the importing was a little bit weird and confusing.
John:
And the UI is not great of like, you know, I had to bring the sidebar back to see my camera, but it mounted as a no name card thing and whatever.
John:
Like it was difficult for me to find some stuff.
John:
It's a very sparse UI, but it's a 1.0.
John:
imported all the photos go into full screen mode and then just start trying to do right arrow rate keyword right arrow keyword still slow and i don't understand understand why it's so slow i'm just there's one photo on the screen i'm gonna fit the hit the right arrow key i want you to show me the next photo i don't need you to keep every single one of my photos in memory i don't think the lack of ram is making that slow but something is and i just want it to be snappy and
John:
I assume that it is snappy if you have 10 photos or 1,000 or even 10,000.
John:
I don't know where the threshold is where this app just starts to fall down.
John:
But whatever it is, I'm past it.
John:
So is it worse than iPhoto?
John:
No, it's not worse than iPhoto in terms of performance.
John:
It's probably a little bit better.
John:
Launching still takes a long time.
John:
Doing all those actions that I was describing still take a long time.
John:
Maybe...
John:
maybe keywording is actually slower in photos than it was you know click one photo shift click onto the next one label for you know my kid's name or whatever maybe that's actually slower in photos but it's close-ish so i did not get the big performance boost that i was hoping again this is a 1.0 um maybe it maybe it's a ram limit maybe i should actually try it on my mac that has 16 gigs of ram and see if it does any better
John:
um so that aspect of it is kind of a wash but i feel relatively okay with the safety of the things again because my entire iphone library is still there still being backed up and my photos library is slowly diverging from it i have for now not been deleting the camera the pictures off my camera when i import them so i have like yet another backup like if i have a catastrophe i still have my old iphone library and i can just re-import everything from my camera at a certain point my card and my camera will fill up so i'll have to revisit that but uh
John:
You know, I'd say so far so okay for the experience of using it.
John:
And the cloud sync stuff, that's the other part that people are complaining about.
John:
So this is my wife's computer.
John:
Hers is the photo computer.
John:
That brings up the next big problem, which is like they haven't really solved the photo problem because the larger problem is...
John:
we have photos that belong to our family.
John:
Like the 67,000 photos, they're not my photos.
John:
They're not my wife's photos.
John:
They're not my children's photos.
John:
They're our photos collectively.
John:
We have a family set up in, you know, the Apple iCloud family thing or whatever.
John:
But to do this photos thing, we have to pick an Apple ID.
John:
So it's my wife's Apple ID.
John:
her she's signed into her apple id on her phone obviously because it's her phone and this is her computer and she's logged into her account so when we imported this thing and turn on the icloud photo library the 500 gigs of icloud storage that's her storage right which means on her phone she has access to all 67 000 photos which is amazing right obviously they're not all on the phone it does all the storage stuff yada yada but it's pretty amazing that you can you know in theory scroll back to you know the early 2000s or the 90s and just tap on a photo and eventually it will download and you can see it love it great right
John:
i can't see any of those photos in my phone even though they're just as much my photos as her photos right uh there's no way to sort of share the entire photo library with the family now there is a family section where anything you put in that album is shared with anybody in your family group but there's no way to automatically share the entire library you have to manually add things stuff to the family collection or of course you can make a shared photo stream and sign up individual people to it but there's no way to basically say
John:
This is the family's photo library.
John:
I want everyone to see it.
John:
Apple has not solved that problem yet or tackled it.
John:
They've only made it so that you can share subsets of photos manually with different groups of people, which is great.
John:
It's good that you can do that.
John:
We use that all the time to share pictures with relatives, but it's not like I'm going to manually drag every single photo of my library into the family thing and then manually drag every new thing.
John:
into there because then i would have because i have my own iphone library on my mac which has nothing in it and on my phone so when if i take a picture with my phone it shows up in my photo library not in the family one and it's just not working the way we want it to work conceptually i want there to be one big pool of photos that belong to the family and maybe separate pools for individuals eventually the kids will want their own separate pools won't want to mingle with ours but
John:
for my wife and i i think we all our photos share one big pool so uh it's kind of a shame that i don't have access to all of our family's photos on my phone and she does but the flip side of that is she has access to all of our photos on her phone which means when she brings up the photo picker in any ios application 10 to 15 second wait before the photo picker comes up
John:
So it's not just, you know, I tried it in Apple Mail.
John:
I tried it in Twitterific.
John:
It is not a per application thing.
John:
You bring up that photo picker, time it 10 to 15 seconds.
John:
And every time, second time, it takes just as long.
John:
Once it comes up, it's a little slow.
John:
But, you know, again, it's amazing you have access to 67,000 photos.
John:
But it's, you know, we are at the limits of what this thing can handle.
John:
It's kind of amazing that it does it and it doesn't crash.
John:
But on the other hand, it's like if you're going to do this,
John:
I don't know what you can do.
John:
Maybe just like only let the photo picker see the last four or five years and then have it like I don't know what you have to do to make that picker come up sooner.
John:
Like I understand the problems inherent in this, but it is not a great experience.
John:
And the final thing I want to say about the cloud syncing here is that Marco was talking about, well, you know, get another Mac, have that do your cloud sync and have it keep all your photos within and your your main smaller Mac, have it just optimize storage and not keep all of them there.
John:
just as raid is not a backup iCloud photo sync is not a backup because if something if you do something bad those changes will rapidly cascade to all your servers that are doing this cloud sync and it will dutifully delete every single photo you deleted from like so if you accidentally delete a huge amount of photos it will delete them everywhere it will delete them off your phone it will delete them off your backup mac mini it will delete probably before you can race into the other room and yank the ethernet cable out of the back of that mac mini it will have deleted a hell of a lot of those pictures so iCloud photo sync is not a backup and
John:
You need actual backups.
John:
And not only do you need actual backups, you need backups like time machine style backups that don't just do disk clones.
John:
You need disk clones, too, just, you know, and cloud backups.
John:
But you need something that keeps older versions of things because it is very easy to have a catastrophic cloud thing that goes wrong that causes a runaway.
John:
You know, that's the type of bug you can have.
John:
It causes a runaway deletion of thousands of photos.
John:
And that deletion will sync if Apple, you know, if Apple does its job well, will sync to all your devices everywhere before you can do anything about it.
John:
And if you don't notice and like 15 minutes later, your backup systems run automatically backup everything and your backups aren't like incremental date type backups.
John:
Like if you have a super duper clone, the super duper clone will delete.
John:
Well, it will clone your drive as it exists now with the deleted photos and those photos will be gone.
John:
So yeah.
John:
In this cloud connected world, you have to be very aware of what kind of data loss changes will automatically be pushed out to all of my quote unquote backups.
John:
So I'm very leery of that and I'm really trying to keep that in mind when I
John:
may have a backup strategy and i have to admit part of my backup strategy is i'm never going to delete my photo library like it will always be there i'll probably never modify those things at the very least all those photos will be you know as safe as they could possibly be sitting on hfs plus where we have no idea what the contents of the files actually are yeah
John:
And speaking of the hard links, I try desperately not to think about the implementation of hard links, which if anyone wants to know, they can go read my old OS X articles about it.
John:
Hard links were grafted onto HHS Plus, and the way it does it is it puts a special file in a special hidden directory, and there's only one of those directories.
John:
And you may not know much about file systems, but sort of kind of gut feeling, if you make a single directory and you just keep putting files in there at a certain point,
John:
Hundreds of files, thousands of files.
John:
How many files can you put in a single directory?
John:
Not nested in subfolders, but just flat in a single directory before the file system gets cranky.
John:
Yes, it uses B trees or B plus trees or whatever.
John:
Wait, that's what it's doing?
John:
There's a hidden directory.
John:
And in that hidden directory is a single file for every hard link on your disk.
John:
No wonder your photos app is so much slower than mine.
John:
I mean, just think about Time Machine.
John:
I mean, Time Machine is just full of hard links.
John:
But, you know, photos, yeah.
Marco:
I think there's your answer.
Marco:
Because I have 27, let me see.
Marco:
Yeah, I have 26,000 photos.
Marco:
So about half to a third of what you have.
Marco:
But my performance is amazing.
Marco:
It flies.
Marco:
I didn't do an iPhoto import at all because I was using Lightroom before.
Marco:
So I was I literally I copied, you know, my directory is the file that the photos and I copied them over to the NAS to to to back it up to kind of like save it.
Marco:
And then I just copied them all into into the new photos app and deleted the originals.
Marco:
So it has it has things arranged the way it wants them arranged.
John:
yeah no i mean this has it arranged it's not once you make the hard links it's fine i'm just like i'm leery of having that many files in a single directory i don't think the fact that i have a bunch of hard links is causing my performance problems because once you make them like reading one file is the same as reading other for any other file this is just the sort of linking one set of data to another it's on on a per file basis especially since like it's not like it's reading the files off disk when i'm like scrolling through them or whatever it's you know thumbnails or whatever crazy database it's doing like
John:
once it's up and running i think the difference we're experiencing has to do with two things one your computer is way faster than mine and two you have way fewer photos so it would be kind of a fun experiment to triple triple the size of your library and see how that performs uh you know like i because i really think there is a threshold because it was iphone there definitely was iphone was fine for many many years and once i started pushing up into maybe it was around the mid 40s maybe into the 50s it started to be like uh uncle like you know that's it you know it
John:
It still did the job, but every operation and like, I'm more picky about this than most people.
John:
Like I don't want to wait for the computer.
John:
I've told the story many times of like when I had my original Mac and the Mac plus the Mac SE 30 and stuff that I would use the computer and you would do things like double click a folder in the finder and it would do this animation where it would show like the, the outline of the new window that's going to open expanding into place.
John:
Right.
John:
Same thing with dialogue boxes and stuff like that.
John:
i would have the cursor waiting on the pet section of the screen where i knew the the close box or the okay button or the next folder i wanted was eventually going to appear when the thing finished redrawing it and i'd know how much of it needed to be drawn before i could click and have the click register in the into the window that's about to appear like it you know it just felt like i was just waiting forever for everything to happen it's like
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
Draw your stuff.
John:
Okay.
John:
Drawing, drawing, drawing.
John:
Just enough of it is drawn.
John:
Now I can click.
John:
Move the mouse to the next position.
John:
Okay.
John:
Waiting for the dialogue.
John:
Like that is my experience of using a computer.
John:
And it hasn't changed much since I've gotten older.
John:
If anything, I've gotten more cranky about it.
John:
And like with the iPod, it's like you're showing a series of pictures.
Yeah.
John:
You have phenomenal computing power compared to the computers I used as a kid.
John:
I just want to hit the right arrow key and I want you to show me the next picture.
John:
Immediately at full res, as soon as I hit the key, I don't think I'm asking for a lot.
John:
It's full screen mode.
John:
There's only one picture on the screen at once.
John:
There is not a giant grid of 60,000 photos.
John:
It is full screen, one picture, hit the next arrow, show me the next picture.
John:
Can I add a rating?
John:
Can I add a keyword?
John:
Do that immediately.
John:
Give me some visual feedback that it has been done.
John:
I don't maybe write it to your metadata database in an async thread.
John:
Like I don't whatever it is that's making it slow.
John:
It's making me sad.
John:
I have some hope that, you know, computer hardware will get faster, faster than my photo library grows.
John:
And, you know, as the kids get older, you take fewer pictures of them and everything.
John:
But I'm never going to delete many more of these pictures like most of the one stars are gone.
John:
So I'm thinking by the time these kids go to college, I'm going to have a six digit number of photos.
John:
And I really hope Apple software can keep up with it.
Marco:
And by the way, this is a perfect example of a very, very common task that people do on their computers that will kill a laptop's battery.
Marco:
Because this is using tons of resources.
Marco:
You're reading tons of little files off the disk.
Marco:
The face recognition thing running in the background, that alone will destroy it.
Marco:
Yeah, and not to mention all the resizing operations of thousands of photos.
Marco:
I mean, that's a big computational job.
Marco:
And if you're browsing through photos and applying some light adjustments here and there, even just what you said, just browsing them at full size.
Marco:
Well, importing is a lot.
John:
I feel like there's a lot of upfront work, especially with the import.
John:
That's why I gave it a chance.
John:
Let it settle down.
John:
It did the import.
John:
Let it do all the faces.
John:
Let it make all its thumbnails.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I feel like you should be able to get the library into a steady state where like, I'm not adding any photos.
John:
I have not added any photos as library for a week.
John:
The app has been running like it's the only app running on the system.
John:
Is anything in it fast?
John:
And the answer is no, it's not.
John:
It's just not.
John:
Forget about adding new photos.
John:
Obviously, every time you add new photos, it's got to parse them all.
John:
It's got to make the thumbnails.
John:
It's got to read the metadata, put it into its database.
John:
It's got to do the face recognition.
John:
Like, I understand that's always going to be grinding away when it's doing that.
John:
Things are going to be slow.
John:
But I feel like
John:
In a steady state, simple operations should be fast.
John:
And they're just not with a library my size on my particular hardware, which is a 2011 MacBook Air with four gigs of RAM.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, that could be a big part of the problem.
Marco:
I mean, that's not a great answer to that question, but that might be a big part of the problem.
John:
I mean, I hope that the SSDs would be a thing like that.
John:
That's why I bought an external SSD.
John:
It's, you know, these are fast SSDs.
John:
The internal one is not great, but like, you know, forget about it on a spinning disk.
John:
I would just be useless.
Marco:
We'll be right back.
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Casey:
This is a little bit of homework that one of us did.
Casey:
But would you like to tell us, that person, about pricing of photos as compared to Dropbox and whatever else that we looked at?
John:
So this is another thing about Apple's photo solution.
John:
They, you know, if you want to use their cloud backup, and you don't have to, by the way, you can just have them on your local disk and it works like iPhoto.
John:
You can do that.
John:
You don't have to pay any extra money for it or whatever, which is great.
John:
I'm glad they gave that option.
John:
But part of the reason I was doing it is I wanted to do the online sync option.
John:
And to do that, you have to buy storage.
John:
And so you get five gigs free with an iCloud with an Apple ID, right?
John:
You can get 20 gigs for a dollar a month, 200 gigs for $4 a month, 500 gigs for $10 a month, and a terabyte for $20 a month.
John:
And those prices are vastly improved over what they used to be.
John:
But unfortunately, the rest of the competition is way better.
John:
So Dropbox is about half the price.
John:
It'll give you a terabyte for 10 bucks instead of half a terabyte for 10 bucks like Apple will.
John:
Dropbox only gives you two gigs for free, but you can refer people to get a little bit there or whatever.
John:
Amazon Cloud Drive gives you unlimited photos.
John:
and five gigabytes of video for $12 a year.
John:
So forget about a month.
John:
Unlimited photos, $12 a year, plus five gigs of videos.
John:
You can have unlimited everything, unlimited photos and unlimited video for $60 a year.
John:
I guess it's kind of good when S3 is your thing and you don't have to pay Amazon for S3 because you are Amazon.
John:
Well, to be fair, they probably aren't operating that in a massive profit margin.
John:
Yeah, that's the Amazon way, but whatever.
John:
Amazon Cloud Drive, ridiculously less expensive.
John:
Microsoft OneDrive gives you 15 gigs for free, which is three times more than Apple gives you for free.
John:
100 gigs for $2 a month, 200 gigs for $4 a month, which exactly matches Apple, one terabyte for $7 a month.
John:
So $7 versus 20.
John:
So their pricing is roundabout.
John:
In the 200 gig range, it's the same as Apple's.
John:
But when you go to one terabyte, $7 a month versus $20 a month, Microsoft is definitely winning there.
John:
And Casey just put in information for picture life, which is 25 gigs for $5 a month, 100 gigs for $10 a month, and unlimited for $15.
John:
So again, another unlimited thing.
John:
Amazon gives you unlimited way cheaper than Apple.
John:
Picture Life gives you unlimited also cheaper than Apple.
John:
Now, what are you getting with the Apple thing?
John:
Like Marco said, integration with all your iOS devices.
John:
It's the only solution that I'm aware of that...
John:
has complete integration with the actual apple photo library lots of these things have their own ios app or whatever and i guess with with you know sharing extensions you can get to the stuff but so many ios apps bring up a picture picker they let you pick from your photo library which is the apple photo library so you are paying for that integration but apple storage pricing is not not that great um
Marco:
Well, but I would say, you know, based on like what it is, where it is integrated, how it's integrated, how it's even presented to you, I would say you're not going to be seeing a lot of people doing comparison shopping.
Marco:
You're not going to be seeing like... No, that's true.
John:
I just like that.
John:
I think it's the ones that really, I think, hurt Apple's competitiveness, especially after they just changed the prices.
John:
The ones that hurt are the unlimited ones because that's like a different ballgame.
John:
It's like we're no longer haggling over the price.
John:
I know you're not going to compare, but knowing that there are unlimited stuff out there...
John:
That's like, well, these are a bunch of pricing tiers, but I've heard one of them is unlimited and unlimited for, you know, $20 a month versus $12 a year.
John:
One is unlimited.
John:
One is not.
John:
And the unlimited one is the cheaper one.
John:
God, that's got that's really got to hurt.
John:
So I feel like Apple still needs to adjust its prices.
John:
You're right.
John:
People aren't going to comparison shop for it, but they're going to be cranky when they realize that.
John:
especially if they're upgrading and they have like a 201 gig library and they realize that they make ten dollars a month they're like that's more than i pay for netflix wait a second right you get the integration it's nice i think people should still definitely do it i think it is the best easiest point and shoot solution for people with photos especially if you don't have a lot of them but i really wish the performance was better and i hope that apple keeps up the pricing and feels feel some pressure to be competitive because right now they are not particularly competitive on storage pricing
Marco:
Yeah, but at the same time, it's within the realm of reason.
Marco:
And, you know, it depends.
Marco:
Again, it depends a lot on how big your library is.
Marco:
Because of the tiered system, like you're right, you know, the 201 gig example, you know, you're going to pay for 500 if you need 201.
Marco:
I need like 280, so I'm paying for 500.
John:
and even like the nickel and diming like their tiers are spread like everyone else is just like small and then one terabyte or unlimited like you know like picture life 25 100 unlimited microsoft 1500 200 one terabyte like that you know that apple apple has a smoother gradation but it's like one terabyte is basically any reasonable person type thing but man 20 a month like
John:
$15 months unlimited on picture life.
John:
Like I don't think it makes that big of a difference.
John:
The bottom line is I would pay double these prices for storage.
John:
If it had two things, the ability to handle my library with much better performance and the ability to share photos in my family in the way that I want, because it frustrates me that only my wife has access to all of our photos on her phone.
John:
I don't have them on my phone and I will never have them on my phone because Apple has no solution for that.
John:
You know, unless we're going to make a giant share, we're going to drag every single photo into the family library.
John:
And I imagine that would probably,
John:
not perform particularly well so i'm not even going to try that well we'll see i mean it was only wasn't it only last year that they introduced family plans was that just last year yeah i mean that's why the feature is there like it's confusing people i see like i didn't make an album called family what the hell is this anything you put in that album is automatically appears in the photo libraries of people who are in your family like you know in the family that you set up that you you know in the assembly review you can read about the whole family thing like
John:
I love that you can set up a family and I like they've added features to have an awareness of it.
John:
It just doesn't quite work the way that I want it to work with my family.
John:
I don't think the way I want it should be the default or like the only way to work with it.
John:
But this particular way, I think, is a common way where like the mom and the dad want to see all the photos and every photo they take, they both want to go into this library.
John:
Like that's I think that's a reasonable way.
John:
to handle photos where as it stands now any photo my wife takes with our phone goes into our family photo library any photo that i take with my phone is stranded in this weird island over on a mac pro and i have to somehow get it over there and i don't have access to any of the photos that she takes or any of the photos in her library unless she manually drags them into the shared thing that we the shared family library or a photo stream that we share it is almost as though every eye device is an island
Casey:
Oh, God.
John:
No, I Life is an Island was the title, I believe, of that hypercritical episode, which Casey will put into the show notes once his computer dries out.
Casey:
So John is saying that, and I apologize if you've heard some clanging and whatnot in the background.
Marco:
Should I leave that in?
Casey:
Yeah, you might as well.
Casey:
Real-time follow-up.
Casey:
I've just poured half a glass of water on Aaron's MacBook Air.
Casey:
oh no it's herds yes because it's the one without the screaming fans so the good news is it wasn't soda so hopefully this will last long enough to finish the episode and then god knows what the hell i'll do apple will know it has been tampered with the little watery things inside of your right now or changing color or whatever the hell they do you were just talking about how you're going to replace yours like imminently oh man that's terrible
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
It's about time.
Marco:
Not for that one though, right?
Casey:
No, but it's about time that I've done this.
Casey:
Isn't that one like only a year old?
Casey:
Yeah, pretty much.
Casey:
Because I bought this mostly because she was using my ancient poly book.
Casey:
Hi, Stephen Hackett.
Casey:
And sorry, I'm multitasking here and drying off my desk.
Casey:
She was using my ancient poly book, which wasn't really working anymore.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
And so I got her this MacBook Air and then started to commandeer it for the shows because it doesn't have a screaming fan on like every other computer I have.
Casey:
So yes, and I accidentally just dumped maybe like a third of a, what is a normal beer glass, a pint?
Casey:
Is that right?
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, it's vague.
Marco:
Yeah, it's probably you probably dumped about four to five ounces of water.
Marco:
I'll say that.
Casey:
So I immediately flipped it upside down.
Casey:
So hopefully that was some of the clattering you've heard.
Casey:
But yeah, we'll see what happens.
Marco:
Aaron's going to kill you.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
You have no idea.
Marco:
And that'll be deserved.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
You just put water into not your computer, her computer.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
I mean, thankfully, I am the Tina of this relationship title insofar as I am the keeper of all of the data.
Casey:
But, yeah, this is no bueno.
Marco:
Well, you have a backup solution, I assume.
Casey:
Yeah, and this thing is also backed up to the Synology, I thought, last I looked.
Casey:
I'm afraid to touch anything now.
Marco:
You might want to verify that tonight.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Because usually the way this works is it'll work fine for a little while, and then it'll start getting flaky and weird, and then it'll just stop.
Marco:
uh like it usually happen over the span of days yeah yeah this is this is no good it's no good kids no good at all oh man that sucks i feel bad laughing it's just it's really uncomfortable and unfortunate
Casey:
Yeah, yep, yep, yep.
Casey:
I'm just mopping up all the water from my desk.
Casey:
Luckily, it was with such force that hopefully only but an ounce or so actually landed on the keyboard.
Casey:
But I should take a picture of the pile of paper towels that I have now put on the floor.
John:
So where is your drink in relation to your computer that this was even possible?
Casey:
John, I refuse to answer that question.
John:
I was like, this is the key to if you do not want to spill liquid on your computer, here's the key to doing it.
John:
Do not have a glass of liquid anywhere that if it tips over, the water can get to your computer.
Casey:
Oh, is that the idea, John?
Casey:
Where were you?
Casey:
Where were you 20 minutes ago?
John:
I have a glass next to me right now.
John:
I reach out and take drinks from it all the time during the podcast.
John:
It is on a lower level than my desk.
John:
And if it's spilled, there is no way that the water could get either to the top of my desk or way over to my Mac Pro, which is on the floor far away from it.
John:
Like there is not enough water for that to happen.
Marco:
An alternate solution is to either use a desktop or when using a laptop, have it up on a stand or something.
Marco:
So that way, if water covers your whole desk, it doesn't really, you know, it might kill a mouse or a keyboard, maybe.
John:
You can still splash onto the keyboard.
John:
Like if the height of your cup is higher than the thing on the stand, it's close.
Casey:
so if i had an extra hand i would take a picture of myself talking into the microphone whilst holding the laptop upside down so hopefully any water and flipping us off no no i'm flipping myself off if such a thing were possible if there if it was possible you'd be the person to figure out how to do it that's true god this has not been my evening kids oh geez this is terrible so what do you think about the iCloud photo pricing the
Casey:
What are we talking about?
Casey:
Is this the show?
Casey:
Is this what people tuned in for?
Casey:
Oh, I'm so sorry.
Casey:
That's all right.
Casey:
Did it to myself, kids.
Casey:
Did it to myself.
Marco:
Let's wrap up.
Casey:
Yeah, I think we should fast forward to the after show as quickly as possible.
Casey:
So whenever we end, there's a prayer that you can get my side of the recording.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
Well, thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Cards Against Humanity, Squarespace, and Jackthreads, and we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss.
Marco:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Marco:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Marco:
Oh, man.
Marco:
No, you're probably okay for the next few minutes at least.
Marco:
But yeah, I would start making... Start convincing yourself that you're going to have to possibly be okay with replacing this computer in the next month or two.
Marco:
Possibly the next week, but most likely the next month or two.
Marco:
How much water are we talking about here?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Again, it was a pint glass that I had.
Casey:
I think it was about two-thirds empty or one-third.
Casey:
That's a statement about my point of view, isn't it?
Casey:
It was two-thirds empty.
Casey:
It was one-third full is what I meant to say.
Casey:
Um, and I, I, I whacked it.
Casey:
And so it kind of, the, the, the glass was immediately to the right of the computer.
Casey:
I'm sorry, John.
Casey:
And the glass kind of flew on top of the computer, which is good in this case.
Casey:
And so I would guess between one and two ounces probably spilled out directly onto the keyboard part.
John:
Oh yeah.
John:
Well, yeah.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'm with Marco on this thing.
Marco:
Oh, I'm screwed.
Marco:
See, the worst part about this is that you might be out some money.
Marco:
But the second worst part about this is that you're going to get email from everybody over the next few days saying, if only you would have done my trick.
Marco:
Here's my trick that works every time or that worked for me once or that I heard work for somebody's uncle once.
Marco:
You're going to be getting everybody's weird tips and tricks of, yeah, well, just put the whole computer in rice.
Marco:
Oh, you didn't do that immediately?
Marco:
Well, you're screwed.
Marco:
But if you would have done that immediately, it would have fixed it.
Marco:
Like, oh, you're going to hear everything from everybody.
Marco:
Yep.
Casey:
I can hardly wait.
Marco:
I'm so sorry.
Marco:
You should ask Mike how to fix it.
Marco:
Oh, that's cold.
Marco:
But actually, he didn't fix it, did he?
Marco:
Nope.
Marco:
Maybe you shouldn't ask Mike.
Marco:
Ask somebody else how to fix it.
Casey:
Thank you, underscore Chris, for that extremely useful piece of information.
Casey:
Hey, this is all caps, mind you.
Casey:
Hey, Casey, here's my tip.
Casey:
Don't spill your effing drink on your computer.
Casey:
Oh, I didn't realize that was the idea.
Casey:
Oh, well, thank you so very much.
Casey:
I will take that into consideration and under consideration in the future.
Casey:
This week is going to suck.
Marco:
Well, I mean, it shouldn't be that hard to dry it out.
Marco:
I mean, Virginia has a pretty dry climate, right?
Casey:
Oh, totally.
Marco:
Not a lot of humidity there.
Casey:
No, not a bit.
Marco:
Oh, man.
John:
i feel so bad for you right now you know that's an innovation they could bring to the macbook one 1.5 or whatever like as the you know we see what the inside of these computers look like right mostly just battery and an ever shrinking part that is the computer um probably this will come to the watch first but that part that is the computer as it gets smaller and smaller it starts to become feasible to sort of especially if they're fanless starts to become feasible to encase that in something
John:
right yeah you know have the heat transferred out to the other the rest of the case and all this stuff you do but like you can imagine making the insides of a macbook one size laptop pretty water resistant like and the little s1 thing looks like it already might be and maybe like i said that's where it'll come first is that but you know as they get smaller and smaller and smaller it starts to become feasible i think to
John:
weatherproof those guts just because there's so few of them and they're less sensitive like the you know especially in the fanless models that you if you just have metal kind of like a sealed metal thing where there's contact good contact and thermal transfer uh why why can't it be a little bit more resilient to water than laptops currently are
John:
i mean if you look at the iphone line though like if any any amount of of good reason why you should make something water resistant applies way more to an iphone than to than to a macbook for the most part the way the way they do it with the phones at least from the samsung ones is they don't try to seal the insides so much as they try to seal the outside like the case make make the case waterproof and then don't worry about on the inside but like the s1 approach and at least in these little diagrams that we've seen is like
John:
the s1 is always shown as like this little module that itself is encased in something i think in the laptops you have more options because in the phones your only option i think really is to try to seal the outer case and that's tough because that takes abuse rather than saying yeah water will get inside the case but once it gets in there's nothing it can do damage wise because the entire guts are sealed up and the only weak point is like where the battery connects and we'll try to make that a waterproof connector but
John:
that i think would add thickness to the phone but in a laptop you get a little bit of leeway like we're not there yet maybe three or four more gens like the next time that that apple puts up a slide that says look at how dramatically smaller we've made the motherboard that time then it's like all right now we're getting to the point where you could actually seal that sucker up inside there
John:
um and make a more this is kind of a shame this is a really expensive thing you happen to spill a little bit of water on it and what you said marco is totally true that people like oh i did it in rice it seemed like it was fine then it started to get flaky and it's just like it's the worst kind of slow motion death you wish you almost wish it was just dead and wouldn't turn on anymore
Marco:
Yeah, because it's like when a hard drive has one bad sector.
Marco:
You know it's only going to go downhill from there, but it might be a slow, awkward, painful thing.
Marco:
And yeah, that's how this is.
Marco:
Maybe it'll just start kernel panicking more frequently over the next month, and you don't know.
Marco:
There's no way to really know.
Marco:
And then now any weird thing that ever happens on this computer again, you're going to ask yourself, oh, is this because I spilled water on it once?
Marco:
You're never going to trust it.
John:
It will be slowly corrupting the data on your disk and you won't know because HFS Plus has no checksums.
Casey:
Oh my god.
John:
You'll load a photo from five years ago and half of it will be missing and it will be blue and sparkly colored.
John:
The OS and the file system think everything is fine.
John:
It just read the bytes right off disk.
John:
This is what was there.
John:
Isn't this what you originally wrote?
John:
We have no way to know.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
What happens if this WWDC, you can't go, which I do not want to happen.
Casey:
I really hope you can make it some way, somehow.
Casey:
But let's suppose you can't go and they release a new file system and let's go out on a really big limb or maybe small limb, actually, and say it's a file system you approve of.
Casey:
I know you'll have plenty of other things to complain about, but what else will you complain about?
Casey:
Like, what's the next lowest hanging fruit?
John:
Realistically speaking, when they replace HMS Plus and it will happen eventually, I have very dim hopes that they will replace it with something that has data integrity.
John:
I think they're much more likely to go for the other features like performance and copy and write and constant time snapshots.
John:
There are many modern features that have more selling points and fewer downsides than
John:
then data integrity data integrity i just think is the most important one so i think if and when they do come out with a new file system i fully expect to be disappointed in the new file system even though it has a whole bunch of the modern cool features that i like because it doesn't have the one feature that i think is essential which is let me know that the data i wrote is the same data that's still there five years from now
John:
mostly because that one feature is is the biggest performance hit like that is the one that costs the most in performance and i really hope i'm wrong about this but like if i had to choose which would you rather have like all the whizzy cool features and better performance and snapshots and stuff like that or data integrity i would pick data integrity
Marco:
If you look at the reality of the world we live in today, the devices that we use, how things are stored, where things are stored, the cloud's role in all of this, you could almost see... If some project manager at Apple is trying to weigh the pros and cons here, you could almost see the argument of...
Marco:
Data integrity isn't worth the cost because the vast majority of our customers are using things like iOS devices where they're not going to have one instance of a file system.
Marco:
They're not going to have one phone using its file system for five years.
Marco:
These things are all shorter lifespans.
Marco:
And they're going to be backed up to iCloud, which will be managing the truth.
John:
Does iCloud use a file system that has data integrity checksums?
John:
I doubt it.
John:
I don't think we know.
John:
I don't think it does.
John:
Do the Linux, uh, ext whatever's, do they have it?
John:
I don't think so.
John:
Uh, I, maybe BTRFS has it as an option.
John:
Some of them have as an option, not turned on, but like, like for the same reason, like data centers won't want to turn on for the same reason because it costs CPU time and they're all about, you know, CPU time is heat is money is air conditioning is like power.
John:
Like, you know, you know what I mean?
John:
Like, I just think we haven't hit that inflection point where it's like,
John:
And in my mind, we have that like it's stupid not to do it, at least in situations where you really care about the data.
John:
But there are still countervailing forces that say, well, we don't really need to do it.
John:
And really data like the rates, error rates are low and blah, blah, blah.
John:
But like the volumes of data are just so massive.
John:
It's like hard drive failure.
John:
It's like it's not a big deal in an individual's life.
John:
But if you're backblaze, 15 hard drives fail a day.
John:
right exactly and so like terabytes upon terabytes of data as the storage capacity goes up chances are almost 100 that you have a bit that slips somewhere is it an important bit does it matter will it ever cause a problem probably not but like especially with the cloud stuff one bum device one phone that is a little bit flaky that you know who knows what was wrong with it hit by a cosmic ray and then that
John:
couple bit error that causes the bottom half of your writing photo to be unreadable gets transferred all over the cloud and dutifully replicated all over the place and you don't notice until you see it next year and the original one is gone
John:
And so that's why data integrity is important.
John:
Someone's got to do it somewhere.
John:
I don't know if it's time for it to be done on my watch, on my phone.
John:
I think it's time for it to be done by Mac.
John:
I really think it's time to be done in data centers, even though it costs more money.
John:
But that's in our lifetime.
John:
I think that's a thing that we will look back on it as being barbaric.
John:
Also, ECC RAM while I'm complaining about things.
John:
Throw that in there, Apple.
John:
You mean the lack of that is barbaric?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
i mean and that's i think that's more on intel than apple because it's like the chipset has to support it and i think only the xeon chipsets of intel stuff ever do it's a little bit more circuitry it's a little bit more expensive uh but not doing it like ecc ram is made more important by hfs plus not care you know like if you have some sort of accidental bit flipping in ram uh
John:
Hopefully, if you're dealing with file system data, you will notice that by like, oh, now that now the file has changed on disk when it shouldn't have or the bytes I read into RAM are not the same as the bytes on disk because the checksum is different.
John:
Like you just you need to have that a way to check whether your answer is right somewhere.
John:
So much for my bike thing.
John:
We'll save it for next week.
Casey:
When that pause happened, I looked up with like a panic in my eyes because I was like, oh God, already?