Daddy Didn’t Want the Good Graphics Card
Casey:
i'm sorry i ruined follow-up so i feel like we should start tonight's programming with a tale of woe i'll start by saying i bought a computer oh i bought a 5k iMac
Marco:
Whoa, okay.
Marco:
So first of all, congratulations.
Casey:
Well, maybe not.
Casey:
So hand on heart, John and Marco did not know that this happened.
Casey:
I've been keeping this a secret from them so I could spring it on the show.
Casey:
I bought a 5K iMac.
Marco:
Is it in your possession yet or did you just order it?
Casey:
Oh, it's here.
Casey:
It's in my trunk.
Marco:
You didn't unpack it yet?
Casey:
Oh, no, I did.
Casey:
Uh-oh.
Casey:
This is my tale of woe.
Marco:
Does it fit in your trunk?
Marco:
You only have a 3 Series.
Casey:
Oh, stop.
Casey:
So I bought this 5K iMac, I don't know, like a week ago, and I watched it march across the United States via FedEx ground, which was infuriating.
Casey:
I mean, I did it to myself because I didn't pay for the super fast shipping, but...
Casey:
I am not a patient man, and it was infuriating watching it march across the U.S.
Casey:
But anyway, it arrived yesterday, and I booted it.
Casey:
I set it up.
Casey:
I moved files from my personal computer with my beloved yet very old circa 2011 high-res anti-glare 15-inch MacBook Pro.
Casey:
I moved files from my work computer, my retina MacBook Pro, my 15-inch retina MacBook Pro,
Casey:
I got everything set up.
Casey:
I put all the software I wanted on it, at least at a glance anyway.
Casey:
Everything seemed okay.
Casey:
I then performed a software update.
Casey:
I let the software update go.
Casey:
I walked away from the computer.
Casey:
I came back to the computer.
Casey:
It seemed like everything had hung after like 20 minutes or something like that, which was well over the time it had estimated to take the software update to run.
Casey:
There was nothing on the screen.
Casey:
The backlight was on.
Casey:
The computer had not, to my knowledge, rebooted.
Casey:
Everything was just there.
Casey:
Or I should say nothing was there, actually.
Casey:
So I powered the machine off, which, to be clear, may have been the fatal mistake.
Casey:
We'll come back to that.
Casey:
I powered the machine off.
Casey:
I powered it back on.
Casey:
The chime sounds.
Casey:
That's it.
Casey:
The backlight's on.
Casey:
The chime sounds.
Casey:
Nothing else.
Casey:
Okay, turn the computer back off after having let it sit for a while.
Casey:
Turn it back on.
Casey:
The chime sounds, and that's it.
Casey:
Hmm, this is not good.
Casey:
Okay, let's go through the steps.
Casey:
PRAM reset, no good.
Casey:
SMC reset, no good.
Casey:
Make a USB boot disk, no good.
Casey:
Mash down on the D key to try to get to diagnostics, no good.
Casey:
Recovery, no good.
Casey:
Internet recovery, no good.
Casey:
It's in a trunk.
Casey:
I have a Genius Bar appointment tomorrow, although I may just end up returning it and buying a different one because it's already completely hosed.
Casey:
I have no idea what I did.
Casey:
It might have been me.
Casey:
I'm not saying it wasn't me.
Casey:
I am not looking for the internet to tell me what it was with respect to the internet.
Casey:
It will be figured out tomorrow.
Casey:
I have engaged two ex-Apple geniuses.
Casey:
I have engaged a friend of the show.
Casey:
Nobody could tell me a good answer as to what I could do to resuscitate it.
Casey:
I think something just genuinely broke.
Marco:
During the problem, were there any USB or other kind of devices connected to it that you could have unplugged?
Marco:
And did you try unplugging them?
Casey:
Oh, yes.
Casey:
So I had my microphone installed because I was all smug and happy.
Casey:
Because the way this episode was supposed to go was I was supposed to say to you, guess what, guys?
Casey:
I am now talking to you.
Casey:
on my 5k iMac the way this episode is actually going is guess what guys I actually have to either return or get this thing repaired tomorrow which is exactly what I'm going to do I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet I'm very sad
Casey:
I did try target disk mode.
Casey:
As somebody is asking in the chat, I tried target disk mode.
Casey:
I have tried everything in my repertoire and everything that two ex-geniuses and a friend that works at Apple has asked me to try.
Casey:
None of it has worked.
Casey:
I'm very sad.
Casey:
But I will tell you, in the two or three hours that it was working, it was a magnificent computer, and I cannot wait to hopefully get one that works sometime in the next week.
Casey:
Yeah, so I'm very sad.
Casey:
It's a sad, sad day for me.
John:
It's kind of like when my grandfather would complain that, uh, modern cars, uh, actually a specific complaint was modern car engine bays don't have any place for you to get your hands down in them, you know, like, cause everything was all packed together really tightly.
John:
And then he would complain about the plastic shrouds covering everything up.
John:
And complaining about how hard it is to replace things like air filters and they don't have carburetors.
John:
Anyway, the related complaint to your 5K iMac is like back in the days of my most feverish trying to diagnose problems, one of the things that I would do in this situation, I almost suggested until I realized it's pointless, is to try to figure out what the hell is going on.
John:
Like you hear the chime, it passes the post-test, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And then what happens?
John:
Can it not find the disk?
John:
Are you getting into the boot process?
John:
And the way you would usually tell that is you could hear whether it had started accessing the hard drive.
John:
And you knew by the series of ticks and sounds, is it looking for a boot sector?
John:
Is it just...
John:
power cycling discs on and off or is it actually beginning the boot process which has a distinctive sound to it or in the old days with the floppy drive you could tell what the computer was doing and at what point things went wrong but with an ssd and nothing on the screen and definitely no indicator lights or anything like that you know hardware indicator lights for the pc folks um
John:
Right, right.
John:
Like, all my old diagnostic tools are useless for these computers that don't make any noise except for the stupid fan.
John:
Is the fan going?
John:
There we go.
John:
We can ask that.
Casey:
Is the fan turning?
Casey:
Yes, it was.
Casey:
As far as I could tell.
John:
Does it crank up to full speed if you let it sit there?
Casey:
No, it does not.
Casey:
And I actually let it sit overnight just to be extra specially sure that it wasn't just me being impatient.
Marco:
Did you spill water into it?
Casey:
I did not.
Casey:
Thank you for asking, but I did not.
Marco:
It's important to establish that.
Marco:
Where?
Marco:
I mean, are there any openings that face upwards?
Marco:
Is there one in the back, maybe?
Marco:
No, he can get water in there.
Marco:
I have a face.
Marco:
Because, I mean, there's openings in the bottom here.
Marco:
I'm going to look behind my one.
Marco:
Oh, God, that's funny.
Marco:
There are no openings that face upward that I can find.
John:
There's not?
John:
There's not like a slit on the top part?
John:
I don't see one.
Casey:
I didn't think so.
Casey:
So yeah, so it's sitting in my trunk.
Casey:
To be honest with you, I'll probably just return it and probably just order a new one because I feel like it's already tainted.
John:
I'm still hoping or thinking or suspecting like this is actually a software, like it's not a hardware problem.
John:
It's a software problem.
John:
Did you, I know you said you tried a million things.
John:
The only other one that you didn't mention that I could think of, well, two things I could think of.
John:
One, I assuming since you consulted all these experts, you made sure that
John:
they all had the most recent up-to-date knowledge about the keys that you have to mash because those have changed over the past couple of years, and a lot of people might give you advice to hold down key combinations that are no longer the correct ones for the same operations.
John:
But assuming that's handled, the only one I didn't hear you mention is verbose booting mode.
John:
I believe it's Command-V.
John:
You should look it up.
John:
The one that spews the Unix console text to your screen during the boot process.
John:
Sometimes that's a good way to find out at what point things go off the rails.
John:
during the boot process, assuming the boot process even began.
Casey:
I did not try that.
Casey:
However, I did not mention that I also phoned AppleCare at like... They're not going to help you.
Casey:
Well, my thought was, let me give them a shot, see what they can figure out.
Casey:
And I started the conversation slightly, well, mildly passive-aggressively.
Casey:
And I said, here's what I've tried.
Casey:
PRM reset, SMC reset, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, to try to establish we really don't need to go through all of this again, if you please.
John:
Have you tried blowing the dust out of the plug?
Casey:
Well, if the SMC reset apparently on these Macs is to unplug it, wait 15 seconds and plug it back in or something along those lines.
Casey:
In any case, I tried everything I knew how to try.
Casey:
I tried everything that the AppleCare person told me to do.
Casey:
In all likelihood, I will just return it tomorrow.
Casey:
I have not yet canceled my genius appointment.
Casey:
We will see what happens.
Casey:
I cannot stress enough, Internet, that by the time you hear this episode, this will already be resolved one way or another.
Marco:
Well, it'll be in the process of being resolved.
Casey:
Well, it'll be in the process of being resolved.
Casey:
Please, Internet, I appreciate your feedback, but it is too late by the time you've heard this.
John:
You can use the fast shipping for the replacement.
Casey:
If I order a new one, I will absolutely spring for the fast shipping because now I'm really, really sad that my... Literally, I use the thing... Let's see.
Casey:
It was 7 o'clock because it was after Declan went to bed that I booted it and started transferring everything.
Casey:
And at 10 o'clock or thereabouts was when I was calling AppleCare.
Casey:
So I used it for three hours.
Casey:
I feel so bad for you for this because... Well, and let's not forget, this is the first desktop I've bought in easily a decade.
Marco:
Yeah, and we will definitely interrogate you about why you chose to do this and why you did it now and et cetera because I really want to know all these things.
Marco:
But first of all, I do want to express my sincere condolences because I hate it.
Marco:
It so puts a damper on a big purchase of a thing you're really excited about that you hardly ever get to buy and it comes and it has some problem that you have to deal with.
Marco:
That sucks.
Marco:
It puts such a damper on the whole thing.
Casey:
Yeah, it really does.
Casey:
And you know what I thought about?
Casey:
So yesterday, obviously, I was much more angry and pissed off than I am now.
Casey:
But yesterday I was thinking about it and I thought, what if, for the sake of conversation, this was my very first Mac?
Casey:
Like, that's a terrible experience.
Casey:
Now, admittedly, this is definitely a fluke.
Casey:
This is weird.
Casey:
This is not something that normally happens.
Casey:
To my recollection, in my eight years of owning Macs, I think that's right, eight-ish years of owning Macs,
Casey:
I have never had a software update fail.
Casey:
So to be clear, this is a fluke.
Casey:
It's weird.
Casey:
But damn if it isn't frustrating.
Casey:
And oh my goodness, if this was my first Mac, I would go running back to Dell.
Casey:
Now, I'm not an idiot, so I'm not going to do that.
John:
I'm not going crazy here.
Casey:
No, I agree.
Casey:
I agree.
Casey:
But I'm just saying, like, if this was imagine if your first experience with this, you know, it was like, you know, three to three thousand thirty two hundred dollar computer.
Casey:
Imagine your first experience is, oh, it works for three hours and then it's dead.
John:
Well, it doesn't really matter.
John:
Like, that experience doesn't really matter unless it's some kind of epidemic, which I'm assuming it isn't, right?
John:
But every company has, like, the DOA things.
John:
All that matters is what happens after.
John:
That's what, you know what I mean?
John:
Like, for Dell, the reason, speaking of Dell, the reason a lot of people like Dell in the enterprise anyway is...
John:
That when something happens, when someone drops their Dell laptop, when something breaks or whatever, you can have new hardware in your hands in a shockingly small amount of time.
John:
And so it's not, you know, things are going to happen.
John:
You're going to get a, you're going to buy 50 Dell laptops and one of them is going to be DOA.
John:
that's not the thing that annoys you it would annoy you for example if you were going through apple if you had to wait a week to get the new one it doesn't annoy you if the next morning when you come into work somebody from dell is there with a box and says give me your old one here's your new one later and you're like oh that was easy and so for apple like the thing that counts is how good was your apple care phone experience which in my experience is not that great how when you go to the genius bar how's that experience going to be
John:
um and how you know how much fuss do they give you how sympathetic are they this matters to how sympathetic is the person to your uh frustration about getting a doa computer which is basically how it's categorized this because assuming this is a hardware thing it's not like the software update broke it it's just you know if it's the hardware problem this machine was just doa and it's best to find this out now right um it's all about how it's handled after the fact and my one i have two apple stories about this i think i've told the other one
John:
on a past podcast but when i got my sc30 the power supply made a high-pitched noise that only people under 30 could hear i do remember this yeah and that was my most disappointing one because uh because i was a kid and when you're a kid or like when you're a kid at heart like casey you get your hopes all for this exciting new shiny computer and it comes and you're sad right so that was that was the most crushing one and the other one which i may have mentioned in the past is when this was the pizza box power pc uh performer actually uh
John:
uh performer 61 something cd uh got that for christmas and or it was a family computer but whatever it's mine um and the uh the terrible gross pc sourced 15 inch multi-sync apple monitor that came with it was doa like the monitor just didn't work you plugged it in nothing happened no lights came on the screen um
John:
so i got that on christmas day and i was older so i wasn't totally you know devastated i didn't have any other monitors that could fit it because of the differences in the connectors this was a multi-sync monitor it's basically like a pc uh monitor connector but with a slight difference and anyway all my other ones wouldn't work with it um so you get something on christmas and you can't use it on christmas you said too
John:
Apple had a new monitor on our front doorstep the morning after Christmas.
Casey:
That's pretty impressive.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So not only did they not wait for us to ship it back or, you know, ship it to us and get it.
John:
It was like you're sad on Christmas Day.
John:
You go to sleep.
John:
You wake up the next morning.
John:
The monitor is on your doorstep.
John:
And so that was pretty amazing.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm curious to see how this works out.
Casey:
But you're absolutely right that it's all about how sympathetic people are and how people react to it.
Casey:
And I think it'll be fine.
Casey:
It'll all work itself out.
Casey:
But man...
John:
what a bummer what a serious bummer and how much hassle it is like do you have to convince anyone of anything is there a lot of paperwork to fill out how long does it take for you to have the situation remedied to your satisfaction like it can make a big difference even if even if like you got it fixed the next day but to do that you had to like argue with someone on the phone that's a terrible experience but right if you go through it and someone is sympathetic and just just you know it seems like bump bump bump oh that's it yep that's it you'll have a new computer on day x you're like oh
John:
that was easy and you come away from that experience if everything has gone well actually liking the brand more than you would have if you had just gotten the thing and it worked out of the box which is yeah yeah totally the perverse way of human nature works the worst the worst one though the one you can't recover from luckily we're all out of this phase is like when i got my obscenely expensive apple 22 inch lcd monitor and had dead pixels on it and i tried not to look for them but i could see them
John:
and there's nothing you can do about that because i knew going in what the policy was the policy is if there's an x number of pixels and they're this far apart or whatever sorry luck of the draw you got unlucky and you know i guess i suppose i could have returned it and tried again and returned it and tried again and returned it and tried again but i was just not up for that you know yesterday i was really upset not even just angry i was i was genuinely upset
Casey:
But today, with a little bit of clarity now, I can see that this is like the most first world of first world problems.
Casey:
That my shiny new computer didn't work immediately.
Casey:
Oh, well, like get over yourself.
Casey:
But man, it did bum me out a little bit.
Marco:
You paid good money for that thing.
Marco:
Don't diminish this.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So hopefully it'll rectify itself.
Casey:
We don't need to talk about this anymore.
Casey:
If you guys don't have anything to say, we can move on to follow up.
Casey:
But if you have any other questions, I'm happy to field them.
Marco:
I have so many questions.
Marco:
But first, we have to do a sponsor read.
Marco:
Fair enough.
Marco:
And first, a quick correction.
Marco:
A couple weeks ago, I did a read for Casper, the mattress company Casper, and I forgot to give the coupon code.
Marco:
So if you go to casper.com slash ATP for their wonderful deals on mattresses, please use coupon code ATP for $50 off a mattress purchase.
Marco:
Once again, code ATP at casper.com slash ATP for $50 off.
Marco:
So anyway, thank you, Casper.
Marco:
Sorry about the mistake.
Marco:
We are also sponsored this week by Fracture.
Marco:
Go to FractureMe.com and use code ATP15 for 15% off your first order there.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
It's very thin, very lightweight, so you don't have to worry about it crashing down off the wall or being hard to hang or hard to install or anything like that or breaking and shipping.
Marco:
All sorts of worries you might have about getting a giant photo print on glass.
Marco:
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Marco:
But these prints look great, and they really want you to get your print out of the Instagram feed, out of the Facebook galleries and everything like that.
Marco:
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Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And just to double down on that real quick, just this past week when I was in a happier mood, I actually made a like six item fracture order because I have plenty of fractures around the house and we're actually going to start distributing them as gifts.
Casey:
And so we bought a bunch for gifts, including one for our own house.
Casey:
They really are fantastic.
Casey:
And I tell you what, I have them.
Casey:
I've paid for them in the past.
Casey:
I've paid for them just this week and they're great.
Casey:
You really should try it out.
Marco:
So check them out.
Marco:
Go to FractureMe.com and use code ATP15 to get 15% off your first order.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Fracture for sponsoring us this week.
John:
one of my questions was about i know you're not gonna mess with it yourself but uh ram that wiggles loose as the thing took its bumpy little journey across the entire country uh it's funny you say that i reseated the ram just to be safe no difference uh let's see i would have said the safe thing is to not try to do that because i don't know like you scuffy
John:
feet on the carpet and like i don't know i would i would be like look i just can't i haven't touched the thing it came out of the box i've been using it like you use a computer by pressing buttons on the keyboard and mouse or trackpad and now it's fried like oh you opened it up well but you're supposed to be able to open it up you know so i just i'm always paranoid with apple so i would not have even tried that i would have just brought it instead of the rams unseated
John:
It's not my problem.
John:
I didn't touch it.
Casey:
Fair point.
Casey:
And actually, that brings up a really interesting point.
Casey:
Let me tell you how I know I'm old.
Casey:
I was extremely, and remain actually, extremely skeptical that me doing like Command R for recovery, I believe that's right.
Casey:
I was looking at the documents when I was doing these keystrokes.
Casey:
So if I get them wrong now, I apologize.
Casey:
But like Command R, Option Command R, whatever it is for internet recovery, and D for diagnostics, all these things that I was mashing,
Casey:
I initially was doing that on the new Bluetooth keyboard that came with it, which, by the way, I like quite a bit.
Casey:
I really liked it a lot, a lot.
Marco:
This is the new, like, semi-skinny one, right?
Casey:
That's correct.
Casey:
But anyway, so I'm doing all of this, and I'm doing it on a Bluetooth keyboard, and the old man in me is so damn skeptical that this keyboard is even connected to the computer...
Casey:
That I first plugged it in with the lightning cable.
Casey:
Then I decided, no, I'm not even convinced that's good enough.
Casey:
And I have 101 key Apple keyboard that I got from God knows where.
Casey:
That's USB.
Casey:
I plugged that in and did all these keystrokes again just to be safe.
Casey:
But it weirded me out to be relying on wireless devices in order to try to kick off these extremely low level like boot sequences.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
i don't know just that's me being old and weird i suppose anyway any other questions or should we do some follow-up why'd you get this computer right so i knew it was time to get a different computer i hadn't bought a computer since my i already mentioned uh 2011 uh high-res anti-glare macbook pro that thing sits on my desk constantly that's all it does is sit on the desk
Casey:
And even though I've been a laptop guy for easily a decade and change, in fact, I think I made the switch during school.
Casey:
So somewhere in the early 2000s was when I really became a laptop kind of guy.
Casey:
And I thought to myself...
Casey:
I will have a work laptop, as we discussed quite a bit several episodes back.
Casey:
I'll have a work laptop.
Casey:
And it occurred to me just yesterday that I have my high-res anti-glare MacBook Pro that I could put an SSD in, like we were just talking about.
Casey:
So I will still have a laptop.
Casey:
And even in a real pinch, I can take Aaron's scuba diving MacBook Air and use that if I really wanted to use a laptop.
Casey:
Beyond that, as I've also talked about on the show, Aaron got me a brand new iPad mini for Christmas.
Casey:
And for a lot of things, especially when mated to a Bluetooth keyboard, that's probably sufficient.
Casey:
So say I wanted to write a blog post downstairs while I'm sitting next to Aaron on the couch.
Casey:
I could use my iPad.
Casey:
I could use her laptop.
Casey:
I could use my old laptop.
Casey:
I could use my work laptop.
Casey:
So if I have like 84 portable devices rolling around the house, do I really need another iPad?
Casey:
But I have a couple of things that I really want running all the time, like Plex, for example.
Casey:
Why not have that running on a desktop rather than running on my laptop?
Casey:
And so it seems to me like I'm running out of good reasons to have a laptop.
Casey:
And so if I'm going to get a desktop, and damned if I don't lust after these Apple Cinema displays that are all over the place, the client that I'm working at, which we've talked about in the past...
Casey:
Why not just bite the bullet and get a damn iMac?
Casey:
And that's what I did.
Casey:
And I tell you what, it's weird only having one monitor because at home, not right now, actually, because I put it away.
Casey:
But at home, I typically have two monitors.
Casey:
At work, I always have two monitors.
Casey:
It's weird only having one monitor.
Marco:
He knows you can have two.
Marco:
Don't email him.
Casey:
yeah i know you thank you thank you oh my god thank you i know you can have two i but when it's a 27 inch screen you really don't need it it's really okay and oh my god is that screen beautiful did you guys know that that screen is really pretty yeah i feel like we should have talked about this in the past or something well marco has the worst one but i have the same one as you
Marco:
You know, it's if only somebody would have told you about a month ago about all the benefits of desktop.
Marco:
Yes, yes, yes.
Casey:
So eventually I thought, you know, it's all kidding.
Casey:
I thought, you know, let me just try this desktop thing because you know what?
Casey:
It's a lot of no question.
Casey:
Full stop.
Casey:
It's a lot of money.
Casey:
What I got was I apologize if I said this already, but I got a middle of the road one.
Casey:
I got it with eight gigs of RAM because I was planning on putting some aftermarket RAM in it.
Marco:
Did you get the good CPU?
Casey:
I got the four gigahertz CPU and I got the one terabyte SSD.
Casey:
So basically a fairly loaded middle of the road iMac, 5K iMac, because I didn't see the need for a really fancy graphics card because I don't ever play games.
Casey:
So I loved the machine for the three hours I got to use it before it died.
Casey:
And I'm really looking forward to sticking with it.
Casey:
I really think this is probably going to be the right answer for me.
Casey:
Ask me again in a few months, obviously, and I say that both sarcastically and seriously because I'm curious to see if I miss it.
Marco:
If it works yet?
Casey:
Yeah, if it works.
Casey:
But I'm really thinking that this was probably the right answer, especially if I start doing a little more iOS development, which I'm hoping to be doing soon.
Casey:
That's a pretty good way to do it.
Casey:
And I will say that after having used this 27-inch 5K iMac for two and a half to three hours...
Casey:
As I was going to troubleshoot, I got out my work 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, and hand on heart, the first thing I thought to myself was, holy God, the screen is tiny.
Casey:
And I never thought that about a 15-inch laptop ever before in my life.
Marco:
Yeah, so two things you and I ruined on.
Marco:
First of all, the screen quality of the 5K is still way better.
Marco:
Even the one I have that has the worst color gamut than yours.
Marco:
The screen on the 5K is way better than the screen on any of the laptops, including the newest 15s.
Marco:
We'll see if that changes when they go to Skylake in a few months or whatever.
Marco:
But as of today, the iMac screen is by far the nicest screen that Apple sells.
Marco:
Maybe the iPad Pro.
Marco:
I haven't looked too much at it.
Casey:
I thought the iPad Mini was actually the best of the portables.
Marco:
I mean, maybe, you know, for, like, certain metrics, you know, I know the test you're talking about, but, like, among Macs, I think the 5K iMac is just far and away, far ahead of the other ones, because just, I mean, everything about it, like, the color, the contrast, like, the pixel density, I don't know, a bunch of stuff I don't understand.
Marco:
It just looks great, and once you're accustomed to looking at a 5K, when you look at a Retina MacBook Pro, you can tell the Retina MacBook Pro screen almost seems blurry by comparison.
Marco:
Like, it's
Marco:
It is a very different look, and it looks fantastic on the 5K.
Marco:
So first of all, you are now ruined.
Marco:
So yes, you can plug in additional monitors to it, but you won't want to because anything else you plug into it will look like garbage.
Marco:
And Apple is not yet shipping a standalone version of this monitor.
Marco:
I hope they do in the future for people who do want multi-monitor or who don't have a 5K but have a laptop or something.
Marco:
But for now, this is the best screen Apple sells, and the only way you can get it is inside a 5K iMac, and nothing else matches it.
Marco:
And even having a laptop next to it is just no contest.
Marco:
So A, you're ruined on screen quality, and B, you're definitely ruined on screen size.
Marco:
Now, and this is how I feel, how I felt for years, ever since I got a giant monitor like this, I can do work on my 15-inch MacBook Pro, and I have, and I need to.
Marco:
Usually a few times a year, I need to do something really heavy on the MacBook Pro, and I'm glad I have it.
Marco:
but every time I do work on the MacBook or I'm tempted to work on the MacBook Pro and I can work on the desktop, like either it's just on the other side of the house or I'll be back home in a couple days and I can do it then, I will just put off work until I can do it on the big screen because I know that I will be way happier and more productive doing it on the big screen.
Marco:
So like...
Marco:
you will probably follow a similar path where you'll be like, well, I could work on this laptop, but his screen is so cramped.
Marco:
I might as well just wait till I can go upstairs and do it on the iMac.
Casey:
Yeah, we'll see.
Casey:
I am genuinely a little... I'm going to use the word worried because I can't think of a better word, but I'm a little worried about what this means for my home life and for my relationship with Aaron because...
Casey:
I don't often sit with a laptop downstairs next to Aaron, but I wouldn't say it's uncommon either.
Casey:
And now if I want to use my computer, I'm going to have to be upstairs in one of our bedrooms, which is my in-home office.
Casey:
And that's where I'm sitting right now to record.
Casey:
And so I don't want to ignore Aaron on a regular basis just because I want to be upstairs on my fancy new iMac.
Casey:
But we'll see what happens.
Casey:
I mean, if that's the most of my problems, I'm in pretty damn good shape, aren't I?
Casey:
So we'll see.
Casey:
But I don't mean this to be snarky.
Casey:
I mean, I genuinely in the two and a half, three hours I use the thing.
Casey:
I really, really, really loved it.
Casey:
I really did.
Casey:
And admittedly, some of that was like, ooh, shiny.
Casey:
But it was fast.
Casey:
It worked well.
Casey:
I was transferring things from both laptops to the iMac.
Casey:
God knows what's going to happen with that data if I return it.
Casey:
But anyway, I was transferring.
Casey:
stuff to the iMac at ridiculous speeds.
Casey:
I was doing like 18 things at once.
Casey:
I'm a really heavy user of, what is it, Spaces, the multiple virtual screens.
Casey:
I know it's all wrapped into Mission Control now, but I barely use them on this iMac because, God help me, I had like 10 different windows open at once.
Casey:
Shut up, John.
Casey:
I had like 10 different windows open at once, which is like eight more than I usually have.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Maybe I just have a simple mind.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
I think you're not the only one with spaces.
John:
I see with all these youngsters at work who, like, we have many more Macs at work now, and we have many more youngsters at work.
John:
And it's very easy to get multiple monitors at work.
John:
So the main, like, the way young people... I'm generalizing.
John:
The way the young people I see at my work... Kids these days.
John:
Exactly.
John:
Use their Macs is...
John:
they have multiple monitors they like lots of monitors like the more the better one guy had like six it was ridiculous um and they full screen everything and they attempt to use spaces and admission control to cycle through things like i'll be sitting there and watching somebody do something at their they'll be demonstrating something and they'll have they'll have a text editor full screen on one 17 inch monitor and
John:
and another text editor or web browser full screen another 17 inch monitor and sometimes it'd be like well go go to this web page go to the source file go to this go to that go to that terminal window all these things would fit on like one 17 inch screen if the person like used windows the way they're supposed to be done because really a terminal a terminal filling an entire uh letterbox format 17 inch screen
John:
is ridiculous right but instead it's like where's that window again where's that window lots of gestures and keyboard combinations to you know go through spaces with the control arrow keys and gestures to swipe from one to the other to try to make the thing they're looking for appear on one of the two screens and they can't see what's in front of behind they just have to like and they don't seem to have an awareness there's no like
John:
like it used to be where spaces were 2d instead of just like a 1d strip remember the 2d spaces thing so you can go up down left and right then at least i'd have a fighting chance instead what i see is two screens that i see hands moving furiously and i see two screens blink blink blink blink blink blink blink blink oh i found it there it is and then we'll go back to the other thing okay blink blink blink blink blink blink blink oh i found it it's like this is this does not seem efficient
John:
So, yeah.
John:
Anyway, people like, and we should know this from Windows.
John:
Windows taught us that people like to maximize everything.
John:
And the Mac users are like, well, Mac users just don't maximize everything.
John:
Well, guess what?
John:
Now that Macs are more common, the people who maximize everything have Macs, and they try to work the same way.
John:
So don't do that, Casey.
John:
It's a waste of your screen space.
Casey:
I don't typically maximize everything, but what I typically do is have spaces kind of orient like things.
Casey:
So as an example, probably the best example is I have one space that has my work I am
Casey:
the relay slack and i messages in three tiles on that space that take up the whole screen so the the left half of the screen is work i am this is on my you know work computer of course the left half of the screen is work i am and then the right half of the screen is split in half so the top half is relay uh slack and the bottom half is i messages and that's actually what's going on right now so that's just a simple example um
Casey:
And I like spaces.
Casey:
It's not for everyone.
Casey:
But like I said, when I was using this iMac, I found that I could just tile damn near everything on the one space, which is a weird thing for me.
Casey:
But my love of spaces is also the reason that I feel like I can't use any other mouse other than the Magic Mouse because I am addicted to the two-finger swipe.
Casey:
I understand that Mike's beloved MX Revolution or whatever it is has configurations in which you can swap spaces with buttons and whatnot.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
Um, but for me, I've always used the magic mouse and I love it.
John:
Plus the mouse crippled him.
Casey:
So then that mouse also crippled him.
Casey:
So there's that minor details, right?
Casey:
No big deal.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Um, so anyway, so yeah, so I, in my brief usage and again, I know I sound snarky, but I'm not trying to be in my very brief usage of this machine.
Casey:
I actually really, really, really liked it.
Casey:
And if I return it tomorrow, if I get it repaired tomorrow, one way or the other, I am looking forward to having some honest goodness time with it.
Casey:
But it was fast.
Casey:
It was nice.
Casey:
It was pretty.
Casey:
The screen was beautiful.
Casey:
I really enjoy the new peripherals.
Casey:
The new Magic Mouse seemed roughly the same to me.
Casey:
I couldn't tell any major differences.
Casey:
I understand what the differences are, but...
Casey:
Just from feel and whatnot, I couldn't really tell the differences.
Casey:
The new keyboard, though, I really, really liked a lot.
Casey:
I feel like every single Apple keyboard in the house, I have the 2011 MacBook Pro.
Casey:
I have the 2015 MacBook Pro.
Casey:
I have the 101-key keyboard.
Casey:
I have a 4-battery Bluetooth keyboard.
Casey:
I have Aaron's MacBook Air.
Casey:
Every single one of those keyboards, I swear to you, feels just a little bit different.
Casey:
But I really liked the new Bluetooth one.
Casey:
What is it?
Casey:
The Magic Keyboard or something?
Casey:
I always get the names wrong.
Casey:
Anyway, whatever the brand new one is, I really liked it a lot.
Casey:
So the hardware, accepting the fact that it died, was wonderful.
Casey:
And, you know, a quick personal anecdote.
Casey:
My office is a disaster.
Casey:
The one in my house is a disaster.
Casey:
You could barely see the carpet and there was like a path between the door and the chair and that was about it.
Casey:
And in preparation for this thing, as it was marching across the country, I finally did what Aaron has been begging me to do for like two years now.
Casey:
And I cleaned up my office and my desk was all clean.
Casey:
I have a glass desk because I've had it for forever, but I guess I'm that kind of a loser.
Casey:
And so I have this glass desk.
Casey:
It was all cleaned off.
Casey:
I moved my mic from one side of the desk to the other, which if you're a podcaster is like a really big deal.
Casey:
And I was all ready to go and it was going to be great.
Casey:
and now it's in my trunk to get repaired or returned tomorrow.
Casey:
That sucks.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm very sad.
Marco:
I really do feel so bad for you because I just, as I said earlier, the idea of having thought about it and saved up and then finally ordered and tracked and received this thing only to have it then just be broken.
Marco:
It's such a damper on what should be the exciting time that you finally got.
Marco:
You paid for it.
Marco:
You waited patiently.
Marco:
You got it.
Casey:
And like I said, as silly as it is, one of the things I was most excited for was to say to the two of you, guess what?
Casey:
I'm talking to you on my new iMac.
Casey:
Like I said, when I was doing all of this installation, I already had my mic connected because there's no reason not to.
Casey:
And then never mind.
Casey:
Sad times.
Casey:
So anyway, we've talked about this far too long.
Casey:
We should probably do some follow-up, especially since we have a fair bit of it.
Casey:
But I appreciate you indulging me.
Casey:
And next week we will have some amount of follow-up.
Casey:
Either I returned it or maybe I got it repaired.
Casey:
We'll see what happens.
Casey:
But we'll follow back up next week.
John:
Before you move on, do you want to preemptively apologize to Declan for his bad Minecraft 2.3 frame rates?
Ha ha ha ha!
Casey:
Well, given that he's, what, 14 and a half months now, I'm not too worried about that.
John:
I said Minecraft 2.3.
John:
By the time he reaches Minecraft age, you'll still have that computer, he'll be using it, and the new version of Minecraft will probably not get great frame rates, and he'll ask why, and then you'll have to explain to him, Daddy didn't want the good graphics card.
John:
Do you really think the good graphics card would make a difference when he's playing a game on a seven-year-old computer?
Marco:
No.
John:
i think it will because minecraft is like i assume there will be no minecraft 2 but who knows at that point in his life but uh minecraft does it can be surprisingly demanding if you crank everything up to max on my uh 5k imac which has the best video card that you can get in that particular machine
John:
you can make it chug occasionally like it can happen um you know obviously he's not going to have the graphic settings max but i think even at standard graphic settings with a reasonable draw distance uh by the time he is of age and minecraft has evolved to have slightly fancier graphics perhaps uh it's not going to get great frame rates and someone's gonna have to answer for that and well i guess i'll explain it to him if you don't want to
John:
Because it's not like you're going to get rid of that beautiful screen.
John:
You're going to use that thing for... It'll be a viable computer for a really long time, except maybe for Minecraft.
Marco:
Okay, first of all, I need to teach you guys about selling computers while they're still worth something.
Marco:
Second of all, I love, John, that you assume there might not be a Minecraft 2.
John:
I know Microsoft bought them.
John:
I understand.
Marco:
It's a billion-dollar business.
Marco:
There will definitely be a Minecraft 2.
Marco:
It might not be good, and it might not be for a while, but there will definitely be a Minecraft 2.
John:
It's already on the App Store, did you see it?
Yeah.
John:
All right.
John:
No, I mean, like, put it this way.
John:
If Notch still owned it, I mean, there should have already been a Minecraft 2 and 3, but there wasn't because the company and the person who owned it just continued to revise the program and continued to sell, you know, the original program.
John:
Now that Microsoft owns it, you're right, there will surely be a Minecraft 2 at some point.
John:
but i'm not quite sure when that will be it could be borderline like they i don't know what kind of priority it is for them to get my to get a minecraft 2 out uh versus just revising and continuing to sell minecraft on every single new platform because they are selling the same game over and over again they'll sell it on ps4 they sell it well you know
John:
Less so now, but they sell it on Xbox One.
John:
They'll sell the PC version.
John:
They'll probably sell a Windows Phone version.
John:
You know, they keep selling the iOS version.
John:
So I don't know if there is a burning need to make Minecraft 2 before Declan reaches that age, but we'll see.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
But where do you start?
Marco:
Blue Apron has you covered.
Marco:
For less than $10 per meal, they deliver all the fresh ingredients you need to create home-cooked meals.
Marco:
Just follow the easy step-by-step instructions they give you for each recipe with pictures of every step right on the recipe card so you can see exactly what it's supposed to look like.
Marco:
It comes with exactly the ingredients you need.
Marco:
There's no massive amount of extra like some herb that you need to throw away in a week when it goes rotten.
Marco:
Now, regardless of your dietary preferences, they have lots of options.
Marco:
They make it a breeze to discover and prepare dishes right in your own kitchen.
Marco:
So this week, they have things like garganelli pasta and tomato sauce with fresh mozzarella and arugula orange salad.
Marco:
That's a mouthful, literally.
Marco:
And buffalo chicken sandwiches with endive and blue cheese salad.
Marco:
You'll also cook with ingredients that you've probably never used before, like this week's poblano chili or baby bok choy or pearl onions.
Marco:
Now, all these recipes are between 500 and 700 calories per portion, so it's really delicious and good for you.
Marco:
Right now, you can get your first two meals for free at blueapron.com slash ATP.
Marco:
That's blueapron.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Blue Apron, a better way to cook.
Marco:
I am still thinking about that Thai soup they had like two months ago.
Marco:
Man, that was good.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, it's funny you bring that up.
Casey:
So as part of Blue Apron sponsoring us, they gave us a few weeks of free meals.
Casey:
And I have been wanting to try Blue Apron for the longest time.
Casey:
It took us all of one week for Aaron and I to look at each other and say, this might be worth it because this is really, really, really good.
Casey:
And tonight we had Korean, and I'm going to butcher this, Korean tiok and spicy pork ragu.
Casey:
And this was one of those things that it's not totally out of our comfort zone, but not in our comfort zone, if that makes sense.
Casey:
And oh, man, was it really good.
Casey:
And last week was our first week.
Casey:
We had a few different things and they were all good.
Casey:
Now, I really I'm really loving Blue Apron so far.
Casey:
And I think it's a pretty much done deal that Aaron and I are going to end up signing up and actually using our own money to pay for it because it's awesome.
John:
Casey, we had the same dinner today.
Casey:
Oh, did we?
Casey:
Oh, that's delightful.
John:
I had the exact same thing.
John:
I had the exact same blue apron meal.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Did you like it?
John:
I did.
John:
It was one of my favorite ones that I've had so far.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Same here.
Casey:
Like it was one of those things where we were both like, yeah, we'll try it.
Casey:
We'll see how it goes.
Casey:
And then Aaron and I looked at each other after having had a few bites and we were like, wow, is this good?
Casey:
Like we didn't expect it.
John:
yeah you can i found that i've not been able to predict like ahead of time which ones i'm going to like and which ones i'm not going to mostly because they're you know they're so varied that you really have no i have no uh uh like baseline to say well i like that i don't know i've never had anything like that before right and the other thing this is getting out of the interview but into like blue apron hacks i don't know if this is a thing that people do
John:
So say you sign up for Blue Apron and you do it for a while and it's like interesting.
John:
Like one of the reasons I think you should do it even if you just do it for a short time is just to see, try a bunch of different new foods or whatever.
John:
And they give you like they give you the ingredients and they also give you like, oh, it's always one page.
John:
Marco would know like a one page thing on how to cook it.
John:
I've never seen it be more than one page.
John:
It's always been.
Marco:
It's always one sheet of paper with about eight steps in the back.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And it has the ingredients on the other side, right?
Marco:
Well, the front of it has like a big picture and then listed ingredients.
Marco:
And then the back of it has like a two-column grid of instructions with photos at each step.
John:
Right.
John:
So when you're done with Blue Apron, say you decide not to pay for it anymore, you still have all those recipes.
John:
So if you liked one of them, in theory, you could go and make it yourself.
John:
Go buy the ingredients yourself.
John:
I mean, you're not going to get the perfect little portions that Blue Apron gave you.
John:
So you'll have to adjust the amounts and maybe you'll have leftovers and maybe you will have that rotting, you know, herbs in the refrigerator.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But you can make these again yourself.
John:
There's no reason.
John:
If you find one that's a super favorite, just add it to your collection of things that you regularly make for yourself.
Marco:
Yeah, we've been with Blue Aprons for, I don't know, maybe six months now.
Marco:
Long before they were a sponsor, we've been using them.
Marco:
And we've been doing that since the start.
Marco:
We've collected all the recipes we like.
Marco:
We just have this giant stack of them accumulating on our bookshelf.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And the problem I had, though, I wanted to make the awesome... I think it's like chicken kassoi or something.
Marco:
I'm sorry.
Marco:
I forget exactly what the name of it is.
Marco:
But it's this awesome chicken Thai soup.
Marco:
And I tried to go buy the ingredients for it last week.
Marco:
And just like my store had almost none of them.
Marco:
But yeah, we've been using it a long time.
Marco:
And that should tell you all you need to know.
Marco:
I mean, we keep using it.
Marco:
What I like about it... This is way too long for a sponsor read.
Marco:
Sorry.
Marco:
What I like about it is that...
Marco:
The reason we did it was that we don't like to have to think about like, what are we making this week?
Marco:
And then plan a huge grocery list.
Marco:
We lasted like two weeks trying to do that.
Marco:
And every six months, we would try to do that again.
Marco:
And we would just fail so soon afterwards.
Marco:
They'd take all the decision making out of it for you, which is really nice when you just don't want to have to make all of these decisions about what are we having every single night?
Marco:
So it's really nice for that.
Casey:
chat room says the recipes are actually available online for free blueapron.com slash cookbook and also their logo looks like totoro so there you go what more could you ask for all right so all right so we should we we should do some follow-up and um we have a fair bit so let's buckle up kids let's start with um we talked about plex a little bit last episode in or maybe it was the episode before but regardless we got a lot of people writing in to ask have you tried infuse for the apple tv and we'll have a
Casey:
The idea with Infuse is that it's somewhat Plex-like in that it will auto-discover metadata about your media collection.
Casey:
So it'll show you your list of movies with movie posters and things of that nature.
Casey:
But the real kick and the real party trick that Infuse has, from what I've gathered...
Casey:
is that it will actually do the transcoding on your device.
Casey:
So really, there's no reason that you couldn't just sit a bunch of files on an underpowered Synology and let Infuse just look at it and then do the transcoding right on the Apple TV.
Casey:
That is excellent and it sounds great.
Casey:
I haven't tried it yet, but it does sound good.
Casey:
The problem I have with this, though, is that it doesn't solve a couple of the other problems that Plex does fix, which is, number one, it doesn't give you external access to your media.
Casey:
So one of the greatest pieces of Plex is that you can get to your media from outside of your home if you set it up properly and
Casey:
And secondly, you can't share other people's libraries.
Casey:
So like Marco and John and I, we have all shared our libraries with each other so that Marco, for example, could stream one of the movies that I have.
Marco:
I've been doing it all week.
Casey:
From my house to his house.
Marco:
We've been watching through your top gear.
Casey:
Well, right.
Casey:
And the reason that it hasn't worked for the last 24 hours is because I moved all my Plex stuff to the iMac that's now in my trunk.
Casey:
But anyway, so yeah, so it doesn't do that.
Casey:
It doesn't do external access and doesn't do sharing.
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, I tried Infuse as soon as people suggested it, because I'll jump on top of anything.
John:
As soon as we talked about it, I don't know, it was many, many shows ago.
John:
I'm like, oh, great, Infuse.
John:
I immediately bought the $10 pro version or whatever.
John:
Yes, sure, come right on.
John:
I'll give it a try, sight unseen, because I got two recommendations from random strangers.
John:
uh but the whole reason the whole reason i wanted it i'm trying to support the app economy the whole reason i wanted it was to you're the one i had this file that i was uh trying to play that i i had to eventually end up using my this is one that i had to use my iMac as the Plex server for because the iMac has no problem transcoding it Plex served from the iMac to my Apple TV was the only thing that played this thing with with all you know
John:
played it all period but played it smoothly and everything so i tried infuse i immediately looked at those that exact file which turns out is this is the info from m player so i don't know how to parse it but it's hevc which is i think it's h264 a particular profile uh 1920 by 1080 so 1080 uh i don't know if it's i or p i assume it's p because it's uh
John:
it's all a video file 24 frames per second about uh 1100 kilobits per second uh two track 48 kilohertz ac audio uh the apple tv can't play it without stuttering so it's it's it's decoding it on the device it can't handle this so i was sad because that was the one reason i bought it but aside from that
John:
it's a reasonable like way like casey said if you have a whole bunch of folders full of video files sitting somewhere on your network this will go through the folders and play stuff for you um and so i'm not uh sad that i purchased it i am sad that apparently uh their software combined with the wimpy uh a8 relatively wimpy a8 cpu system on a chip thing inside my apple tv can't play this fairly demanding file
John:
and i already watched the whole show i watched it on my ipad by the way because what i did was i went into plex and finally i finally had to uh give in and say fine plex you can optimize this quote-unquote optimize it by by re-encoding it to a smaller size and then i watched it on my tv and on my ipad over the course of a few days wait so you said this was hevc video because that's h265 that's kind of a big deal that's like that's it's very reasonable to not be strong enough to play that
John:
oh well that's probably doesn't have it doesn't have the hardware i always remember reading about some apple thing that actually has h265 hardware but it isn't actually used but anyway yeah that that would make sense in that like uh infuse probably does great because the aid has dedicated h264 decode hardware uh but if it's not h264 and instead is h265 and either the system on the chip doesn't have hardware for it or that hardware isn't enabled by apple's os then yeah i would have to be trying to do it all in the cpu and i can understand why it would choke to death
Casey:
Yeah, I also should point out that just earlier today, I listened to Mac Power Users episode 299, which we will put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
And if you've ever wanted an unbiased opinion about, or certainly not biased by me, opinion about Plex, if you've wondered how to get started with it, if you've wondered what it brings to the table, listen to Mac Power Users 299.
Casey:
It's a really great episode that goes all into Plex.
Casey:
So you should check that out.
John:
here's one more drive-by complaint about plex which i cannot believe that they don't do i just assume they did and maybe i haven't found it yet so you you have a blog post which maybe you can link in the show notes casey about like uh introduction to plex that you did a while ago like how to name your files linking to like the plex file naming guide and figuring out i'm like and i wondered when i read that at the time like because i wasn't using plex that much like this seems weird maybe why is he doing this just because like oh if you want to have everything perfect just do it this way but like surely there's a feature in this thing where you can essentially just
John:
find some media that he that it either has shrugged its shoulders at or has misidentified and say oh well you got it wrong and go in there and just type some random words in a search box until you find the search result you want and go oh yeah it's that one so like say you mislabeled star wars or something and it's confused about what it is you know like oh well you don't know what this is because i have the the files named weird or whatever so i'm just going to go in to your search box and type star wars and see the 8 000 results for star wars and find the one that is
John:
not the special edition, but the original 1977 version.
John:
I just click on that one and say, yeah, this is that one.
John:
Is that feature not exist in Plex?
John:
If it exists, I can't find it.
Casey:
No, it does.
John:
I can't find it.
Casey:
I could swear it does, but I can't walk you through where it is because my iMac is in my trunk right now.
John:
All right.
John:
Well, anyway, maybe I haven't found it yet, but every time I go to edit the metadata, it's like, if I name the file, then yeah, we'll figure it out.
John:
If I don't name the file right, all I can do is pick cover art and stuff.
John:
If it is totally wrong about the metadata, I can't do a search and say, surely the database that you are using has this metadata in it.
John:
You're just not finding the right one.
John:
So rather than me editing the individual metadata, which I don't want to do, I just want to say, let me do a search of your big database full of stuff, like a pretty broad search.
John:
And let me pick the blob of metadata that I'm telling you is this one so that I can manually fix everything that I had, like so that if I didn't know how to label.
John:
like some uh you know special of a show like a christmas special of a show that's not part of any particular season i didn't know the secret season zero weird you know convention they have i can be like oh well let me just do a chronological search search of the most recent episodes from this series and i will find whatever blob of metadata corresponds to this and then click on it and it will automatically label it as like season zero i'm like oh well i would never figure that out my own anyway i'm still still working through my plex expertise
Casey:
Yeah, you know, the thing with Plex is it's very opinionated about file names and file conventions.
Casey:
But once you understand its opinions, it's actually very simple to work with.
Casey:
And that's what my blog post was about.
Casey:
I am almost positive the feature that you're talking about, John, about fixing mismatches.
Casey:
I'm almost sure it's there, but I don't want to say that for certainty because I can't try it right now.
Casey:
Because, again, my Plex server is currently in the trunk of my car.
John:
Yeah, I'll keep looking for it.
John:
But the thing with the opinionated naming, its opinions are wrong.
John:
i refuse to comply i know the naming scheme now i've read the documentation but there's no way in hell i'm putting a year in parentheses at the end of my movies or television shows no and i i object to season zero i don't like it for the record season zero for um for tv shows is specials so like the top gear polar special for example would be a season zero entry
Casey:
Anyway, we have a fair bit of feedback about Swift and Default Final, and I'm stunned.
Casey:
I'm flabbergasted.
Casey:
It appears that Marco has done some homework and has put something in the show notes.
Marco:
I flagged an email, yeah.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
Yeah, I hit three keys to make this happen.
Casey:
Are you okay?
Casey:
Do you feel all right?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
Alright, so this was feedback from Nick Matsakis from a longer email, very thoughtful.
Marco:
I'm going to read just a quote here.
Marco:
He said, so we were talking about Swift basically having classes be default, final, as a proposed change to the language during the revolution.
Marco:
That's kind of a debate raging on right now.
Marco:
And this would mean basically that by default, classes couldn't be subclassed.
Marco:
Subclassing would still exist in the language, but the default, unless the class was specially marked with whatever keyword would say extensible or whatever, the default would be you can't subclass things.
Marco:
So Nick says, the late 80s and early 90s were the heyday for object-oriented programming.
Marco:
In languages designed in that time, like C++, Objective-C, and Java, it was taken as a given that subclassing was a good thing and should be used pervasively.
Marco:
However, a couple of decades of experiences with such languages has led to two key insights I think we've learned as an industry.
Marco:
The first is that in order to write classes that can be robustly extended through inheritance, allowing both the base and derived classes to evolve with minimal risk of breaking each other, see also the fragile base class problem,
Marco:
Careful consideration should be given at the time the class is designed and written.
Marco:
I think this argues for default closed.
Marco:
I think we've learned an even more important lesson, though, which is that class inheritance should be thought of as a limited tool to solve a prescribed set of problems, not a general mechanism for code reuse.
Marco:
So this makes a lot of sense to me.
Marco:
I totally agree with Nick.
Marco:
I kind of breezed by when we were talking about this last week a quick statement of basically saying I think we've seen a lot of anti-patterns and dysfunction that subclassing everywhere can bring and some of the challenges it brings and some of the...
Marco:
I think I agree that what we've seen is that it basically shouldn't be the default that's everywhere.
Marco:
And the Java people will have to find a different way to program, I guess.
Marco:
And the PHP people have to find somebody else to copy.
John:
This is actually a pretty old nugget of wisdom, the downsides of subclassing.
John:
And you can tell it's old because Objective-C is in many ways a reaction to it.
John:
Objective-C is like 1989-ish.
John:
It is itself a very old language.
John:
not objective c so much but like the frameworks built on it uh app kit or whatever it was called i think maybe it was always called app kit but anyway uh the next the next step uh frameworks especially the ui frameworks use delegation a lot a lot more than contemporary frameworks for doing similar things that were all about subclassing they were either you know functional in which case they didn't have opposite classes at all or they were enamored of the idea of subclassing uh but the next uh apis and frameworks heavily use delegation patterns
John:
to avoid subclassing and to say, this is a better way.
John:
That way we have understandable individual objects that just use each other to do things.
John:
And the way you alter behavior is by giving it a different delegate.
John:
I mean, hell that's essentially a Marco can correct me if I'm wrong.
John:
Uh, the, the next equivalent of like, you know, you don't write a main routine.
John:
There is a main routine obviously, but, uh, your app delegate is basically your application.
John:
Am I, am I correct in my vague understanding of the, uh, the cocoa frameworks?
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, you don't subclass UI application.
Marco:
You provide an app delegate that conforms to the protocol, and you get messages delivered there.
Marco:
And if you don't pay attention, it bloats over time, and eventually all of the code in your app is in the app delegate.
John:
Well, that's like writing all of your code in main, like a rookie mistake, right?
John:
But yeah, so even the very simplest...
John:
starting point of your program is done through delegation and lots of the ui frameworks are done through delegation because and then you know delegation eventually not not specific delegation but uh trying to avoid inheritance can lead you to uh a sort of the the inversion of a control pattern which can get kind of weird and nasty speaking of java where
John:
You're trying to use composition instead of inheritance, but you want to give people access to the different pieces that get composed into the whole.
John:
And so your entire program is dictating what things are composed into what to get your classes into the parts we need to go.
John:
Anyway, any any sort of program code reuse, essentially technology.
John:
A code reuse technique, whether it's inheritance or delegation or composition or any of the other patterns in the lovely patterns books can go awry.
John:
But I think pretty early on in the history of oriented programming, the downsides of inheritance were clear.
John:
And anything that came after that sort of understanding has tried to do something different, including the things that were the precursors to the frameworks that Apple now uses.
John:
But we were talking about in the context of like even AppKit and UIKit and all these frameworks that use delegation patterns.
John:
As application programmers, often you subclass either because that's the intended use of the thing still in some cases, or because you like that thing, but you just want it to be a little bit different.
John:
Or you need to just override this.
John:
Because it's possible, it is a tool that's in the tool belt of programmers to get what they want out of frameworks, whether or not their framework really ever intended you to subclass that thing.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So another thing that was written in, Andreas Hartl, he made some great points about mocking using Swift.
Casey:
He said, there's another unforeseen consequence of going final by default.
Casey:
Tests that could have used mocks to ensure their framework method, as was called, can't do that anymore.
Casey:
This is because mocks rely on subclassing to replace all API functionality with no ops.
Casey:
I'm not going to get into what mocking is if you're not familiar with it, but suffice to say that in the last couple of years, I've really gotten into unit testing, like formal unit testing, and mocking is kind of your path to happiness there.
Casey:
And it's what really made me understand why designing to interfaces or protocols, if you will, is really kind of the right idea.
Casey:
And that's not an insignificant problem if this is the way that Swift goes.
Casey:
So I thought that was a very astute point.
John:
It seems like it's not a significant problem to me because I assume there would always be a compiler mode that says disregard the final keyword.
John:
you know what i mean like for for when you when you run your unit tests don't seal anything up as final because it shouldn't it shouldn't affect functionality it maybe you would disable some optimizations and maybe you wouldn't have a bug for bug compatible thing in terms of maybe there's like a bug in the compiler that causes the optimization goes awry but it seems trivial to me to have a compiler option that says uh either just ignore
Casey:
final entirely like don't seal up any classes or uh change what the default is or something like that that allows you to mock in your unit tests yeah yeah that's an interesting point i don't know how that would be handled um moving on neil cronin was one of a few people to write in and point out the error in what i or potential error in what i'd said i don't recall exactly how i'd phrase things but it sounds like i probably got it a little wrong um he pointed out
Casey:
that c-sharp methods are final by default um but classes are not and so i think i might have interspersed classes and methods a little bit last episode but to be absolutely clear classes are not final by default but methods are so that's my bad on that uh we'll have a link in the show notes to that um also uh chris d i'm not going to even try to pronounce your surname um zomback i go with zomback
Casey:
Okay, there you go.
Casey:
Pointed out that you can do something like final and objective C with a couple of fancy compiler directives.
John:
You put enough underscores and anything is possible in C, C++.
John:
Underscore, underscore, attribute, underscore, underscore, double open parens, objc, subclassing, restricted, double close parens.
John:
Yes, there are.
John:
so many attributes you can add you can annotate all your things with nullability information for the swift bridging and you can say objective c subclassing restricted that's from jesse squires gave that little uh attribute yikes goodness
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then one of you guys wanted to talk about Rust versus Swift versus Go.
John:
Yeah, that was me.
John:
The Rust people have come out to defend the honor of their language and to differentiate it from those other things Go and Swift.
John:
We were talking about the languages that are kind of in a little group of these...
John:
uh static compiled languages with an eye towards being a better c plus plus without all the downsides of c or c plus plus you know being like swift essentially um and uh benjamin sago yes points out that uh rust i mean i think we mentioned the show but he's emphasized by a
John:
uh rust is not garbage collected go go uses a garbage collector at runtime swift of course uses reference counting uh that means there are programs you can write in rust that you couldn't write in swift or go such as graphics intensive game a browser engine or an os or device driver or a garbage collector or anything that has to interact with the language that has its own garbage collector now i would imagine the swift people at the very least would object to the idea that you can't write a graphics intensive game or browser engine or an os because those are some of the state of goals of swift
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
I would even object to his characterization of reference counting as a form of garbage collection.
Marco:
I don't think I agree with that.
John:
But what he's talking about is like my understanding, I'm sure we'll get more email about this with Russ because I haven't done enough of my homework, is that the way Russ gets around not having a garbage collector and not doing reference counting is at compile time it figures out what it has to do with memory.
John:
uh rather than at run you know in other words it's not like the the thing against garbage question we know we know is like at some point you have to go wander all of your stuff and clean out the garbage and that takes time and even if you do it on another thread uh at some point you may need to pause the the program and if you don't need to pause it and you have a pause free garbage like there's always some kind of overhead of uh having to do the garbage collection uh
John:
uh while your program is running and the the uh the swift solution uh and the objective solution for that matter but the swift solution is uh figure out what use reference counting to figure out when things aren't needed anymore and put the reference count put the stuff that deals with the reference counted in line with your program so while your program is running it will do this thing do this thing increment this reference count do this thing do this thing decrement this reference count and like when the reference count goes to zero you can
John:
uh you know get rid of that uh memory and and you know so it's it's in line in your program it's actual code execution it's not another thread writing a garbage collector or anything like that it's like it's as if you had written in your program in c parlance you're writing malloc and free right you know when you can free the memory because that's when you write the free thing and you know when you're allocating memory because you're at malloc and you have to figure out you know
John:
Uh, it's, it's reference counting, but it's in line.
John:
And so in some code, you don't want this bookkeeping of incrementing and decrementing this number to keep track of how many, uh, references there are to it.
John:
You just don't like when you're writing the kernel of an operating system in C most of the time.
John:
you're not implementing your own reference counting system you're just putting the mallocs in the right place and putting threes in the right place or if you're in a particular part of the kernel you can't use malloc or free you've got to do everything with wired down memory and so you can't have anything having to you know like it's not it's not appropriate to have uh automated uh memory management in that way i would imagine the answer for swift is
John:
that you can write those parts of the program.
John:
If you understand enough about how Swift manages memory, even though you don't see any of the memory management, you can do it in such a way that you know that all of the silly reference counting increment decrement stuff will be removed by the optimizer as no ops because you know exactly how, you know, how things are going to get sorted out.
John:
And this thing will run straight through without any memory information.
John:
But still, Rust is heavily focused on the idea that it does not use a garbage collector and it doesn't use reference counting.
John:
So it's really trying to be like C and C++.
John:
Both of them do not have garbage collections and they don't use reference counting unless you write it yourself.
John:
So Rust is definitely a closer...
John:
a closer match to a replacement for those programs and i i do believe that there are probably some programs especially now uh with swift as young as it is that could be written in rust that could not be written as efficiently in swift but long term i think that'll be quite a battle all right anything else about swift please no
Casey:
All right, how about MagSafe and USB-C ports?
John:
Last episode, I think, we're talking about the MacBook One connector with that MagSafe adapter that fits in the little USB-C port on the side and whether it was really necessary and none of us had MacBook Ones that we had tripped over or yanked the cord out of.
John:
And I said I thought that nobody had done that experiment.
John:
Well, Glenn Fleischman didn't really do the experiment but did delve into the science behind the USB-C connector to try to figure out
John:
uh with thought experiment and some basic physics calculations and some numbers from the usb c spec what would happen if you tripped over a macbook one cord that was plugged in uh as compared to what would happen if it had a magsafe connector and the conclusion of this article which again this is an older article might have been even before the macbook one was out but it had been announced obviously was that uh your laptop will fall on the ground
John:
uh that yes you totally can pull a macbook one off of a surface onto the ground by tripping over the cord just based on the forces involved um and the speed of the the yanking and the angle and all these other things so you can read the article to find out perhaps not as good as actually doing the experiment or perhaps not as good as a bunch of people who own macbook ones having their children trip over the cords and find out what happens but so far no one has written in about that happening so all we have is this speculation by glenn fleischman but there you go there's an answer
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And why don't you tell us about up there and whether or not they use AWS?
John:
Yeah, just a quickie follow up last time someone had said they used AWS and up there had replied on Twitter.
John:
No, we don't.
John:
We host all our own stuff.
John:
And so a couple of people went back and forth on Twitter trying to figure out, well, then why is up there connecting to AWS?
John:
And a theory was that it was because of Crashlytics was a crash reporting thing.
John:
And UpThere confirmed they do use Crashlytics.
John:
And Crashlytics said if you use Crashlytics, you will connect to AWS.
John:
So there's your answer to why UpThere is connecting to AWS.
John:
It's for Crashlytics.
Casey:
Excellent.
John:
That's the magic of Twitter, by the way.
John:
Random podcast that we do, random listener of the podcast uses Little Snitch software to say they saw it connect to AWS.
John:
Then the three companies that replied, the three sort of corporate Twitter accounts, the Little Snitch account, the Crashlytics account, and the UpThere account.
John:
It's the magic of Twitter.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Now, if you have ever tried to register a domain name anywhere else, you will know that prioritizing the experience and the ease of use is pretty rare in this business.
Marco:
I had to log in and manage an old domain that is somewhere else earlier today.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you very much to Hover for sponsoring our show once again.
Casey:
Excellent.
Casey:
So you went to a tech talk?
Marco:
Yeah, I went yesterday to the Apple TV tech talk in New York.
Marco:
So the tech talks are basically Apple goes around the country with the developer relations team.
Marco:
Maybe not every year, maybe every couple of years.
Marco:
It depends on when they can do it.
Marco:
But they basically send the team around kind of as like a halfway point between WWDCs.
Marco:
And they put on these little... It's basically a one-day mini WWDC that is usually focused on just one relatively new platform.
Marco:
So I went to one a few years ago that was just for iOS.
Marco:
I believe last year they might have watched ones.
Marco:
I forget.
Marco:
But this year they're doing Apple TV Tech Talks.
Marco:
And so it's free.
Marco:
It's one day.
Marco:
You sign up.
Marco:
It's just picked by lottery.
Marco:
And it's in a bunch of cities around the world.
Marco:
And you just go and it's in a hotel meeting room or whatever.
Marco:
It looks exactly like mini WWDC.
Marco:
It's great and very well presented, high quality presentations, but only a few hundred people in attendance rather than 5,000 in the giant Moscone Center.
Marco:
So it's a nice small scale.
Marco:
You actually get to talk to the Apple people and meet other developers on a nicer, smaller, shorter, and way less expensive scale.
Marco:
So I went and it was great.
Marco:
I still am not entirely convinced that I want to be developing for the Apple TV yet.
Marco:
I would like to do it sometime.
Marco:
I'm not sure that time is now.
Marco:
I'm very excited to develop for it.
Marco:
I just, I don't know.
Marco:
I don't, I'm not seeing the market demand for it yet, really.
Marco:
So if you really want overcast on the Apple TV, I guess let me know.
Marco:
But right now, I just haven't heard from enough people who really want that.
Marco:
And other things I think are more important for now.
Marco:
But I do look forward to it.
Marco:
It's a great platform.
Marco:
And the talks were all about basically video playback and games.
Marco:
That was the main areas that they focused on.
Marco:
Because that is what the Apple TV is best at.
Marco:
Video playback and games.
Marco:
As an audio-only podcast app, I'm not sure there's much for me to do there besides get people's audio into their home theater systems, which people do occasionally request, but it doesn't seem like there's much demand for me there.
Marco:
But we will see.
Marco:
iOS 9.3 and tvOS, whatever, is it also 9.3?
Marco:
The new beta that we should talk about.
Marco:
They added a podcast app, like their own Apple podcast app, finally.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I guess we'll see if a lot of people use that and I start hearing people saying, oh, I switched back to the podcast app so I could play it on my Apple TV.
Marco:
If that happens a lot, I will definitely respond to that and I'll make it happen.
Marco:
But I think eventually it might, but I don't think the time is yet.
Marco:
so i guess we'll see if you're like somebody who makes the app for a video owner like like a lot of people there i talked to like they they were like the ios programmer on the ios programming team for a tv network or something like that like you know where that makes sense like for them to be making apps that makes total sense but for me i'm not sure it makes sense yet but we'll see
John:
anyway uh so i think we should honestly talk about ios 9.3 what do you guys uh i'm just gonna second your uh endorsement of tech talks i've only been to one uh but it was it was exactly what you said it's like a little mini wwdc in a worse venue yeah and but it's free and it's one day it's great with slightly slightly worse food honestly the food here was was better by a lot
Marco:
maybe things have changed i guess probably depends on the hotel i like maybe they have to use the hotel's catering but the one i went to was they had these terrible little box lunches which granted the box lunches wwc aren't that great either but these were even worse but no this we had like we had a hot buffet and uh and well i mean it helped i didn't i didn't even try the coffee because there was a cafe grumpy downstairs so i just went to the cafe grumpy and get excellent coffee there anyway
Marco:
So, yeah, 9.3.
Marco:
So, this was weird.
Marco:
This was very weird.
Marco:
Monday or yesterday, I forget.
Marco:
Anyway, this week, earlier this week, Apple unveiled a page on their website called iOS 9.3 Preview.
Marco:
And they released, I guess, Beta 1, or I haven't even looked at it yet, but they released Beta 1 of iOS 9.3, whatever version of watchOS I think corresponds to that, and then tvOS, the same, you know, whatever version corresponds to that.
Marco:
And so there's a few very interesting things about this.
Marco:
So first of all, Apple has never given this public unveiling of a beta OS before in a marketing way.
John:
they do it in os 10 like at a certain point in the os 10 beta release cycle for many many years now they've had a page it's basically apple.com slash os with a little x slash preview or some other word and it shows you the features of the upcoming as yet unreleased this is even before they had the public betas they wouldn't do it for the very first build very often they'd wait until like it was a wwdc announcement but they would have an entire section of their site dedicated to the os that you cannot yet download
John:
The weird thing for iOS is I don't know if they've ever done it for iOS because I don't pay that much attention, but they did it pretty much simultaneously with the beta release to developers.
John:
So it's not like developers would go to Apple's public website to see the features of the beta that they are just able to download now.
Marco:
Yeah, it's great.
Marco:
And what would usually happen in the past with iOS is the beta would come out and then immediately all the rumor sites would have people digging through it.
Marco:
And then within hours of it being released, rumor sites would have like 10 articles about each little minor change somewhere in the settings screen or an app got a new tweak or whatever.
Marco:
um so it like so this makes sense as a way for apple to basically just kind of own that and control the message and and have you know have it be a proper marketing handling of this kind of event rather than just letting the rumor sides dictate everything um so that's good you know it's it's kind of like legalizing pot it's like if you want to like discourage the bad behavior like just you know take take away the value you know apple just here here's everything that's new here you go you know
John:
well not everything that's new i still hope i assume the rumor sites found all the new because that little change in that setting screen apple's not going to put it on their giant preview page what the the wi-fi assist uh label of how much data is used yeah or stuff like that like there's still plenty of fodder for rumor sites to dig into but they they hit the highlights yeah but it all yeah it's plenty of boring fodder for them to dig into and yeah apple well that's that's that's their core uh the core audience needs to know tell me every screen that changed they changed the spacing on this label
Marco:
one of the most high profile changes they've made is called Night Shift.
Marco:
And Apple was the very first people to ever come up with this idea of changing the color balance on your display, changing the white balance so that it's
Marco:
Cool temperature and what we consider now to be neutral during the day.
Marco:
And then at night, it slowly changes to a warmer color temperature.
Marco:
So you don't have your eyes be shown blue light that keeps you awake and makes you sleep worse.
Marco:
So it slowly warms the color temperature on the display until you go to bed and then changes it automatically the next day.
Marco:
I wish this was available on my Mac.
Marco:
For years, I've wanted something like this and no one has ever thought of it before.
John:
If only.
John:
Your tone of voice makes me think you suddenly support patents.
John:
yes other people have had this idea before but you can't like an idea is out there for anybody to take uh so i really hope i i forget if they even did have a patent or whatever but this is not this is an obvious enough idea that i would not call this a sherlocking i would not call this a case where apple
John:
is taking an application wholesale like you know the watson application and making their own equivalent that's named it's named based on the same theme as the original application that looks like the other application that works like this is not an application this is a fairly simple idea that was not invented i'm sure by the creators of the flex application that you're referring to yes i'm totally okay with apple taking because it's a good idea and i don't think anyone should own that idea even if someone actually does
Marco:
Well, I think I might disagree with both of those points.
Marco:
So yeah, I was being sarcastic, obviously.
Marco:
What we're talking about is there's been this application called Flux, spelled F dot L-U-X, and it's been available on computers forever.
Marco:
And they had an iOS hack version where they couldn't put it in the App Store, so they did a silo where you could download...
Marco:
like a binary library in with a project into xcode and have it installed onto your phone and they did this back in november and it got thousands or millions of tons of downloads and then on i was on november 12th two months ago uh they they posted saying that uh apple had contacted them
Marco:
and had said that the iOS download of their side-loaded app here was in violation of the developer agreement.
Marco:
So this method of install is no longer available.
Marco:
Apple has indicated this should not continue.
Marco:
So they don't really say if Apple legally threatened them or anything, because technically they could have continued to distribute it, probably.
Marco:
So this was all just two months ago.
Marco:
And then all of a sudden now in what is the next major iOS feature update, that next update has a feature that is a direct copy of what this does.
Marco:
So I wonder if they actually made some kind of small deal where maybe Apple said, like, we don't want you doing this.
John:
shut it down and we're going to do it ourselves and we won't sue you or shut it down we'll give you a small amount of money and we'll do it ourselves and you won't say anything you know that it's probably something like that but the only reason they would have to give them some money is if they have a super dumb patent on this idea right there's two separate issues here one uh being mean to the makers of flux and not letting them use sideloading to this not allowing sideloading at all like that's a whole separate issue of like
John:
hey apple why is the only way that people can get applications on their devices through the app store what about a a way that you won't complain about that expert users can use not a lot of people are going to use it no one's going to download xcode and build their own thing and sideline like only you know only the nerds are going to do it why not just let that go that is a separate issue the separate issue from is it okay for apple to take this idea and
John:
that again i think the inventors of flux probably did not invent uh of changing the color temperature display based on the time of day and incorporate that into their os for the their most popular platform that seems like a no-brainer slam dunk and the only thing that apple would trip across is if someone has a super dumb patent on and they have to pay somebody for it i have no idea about those legalities but i think that whole system of the law is stupid i am totally okay with apple incorporating this idea because it's a good idea and because nobody should own this idea
Marco:
First of all, I think the way they're doing it, just the timing of this and the way they came down so hard on Flux and then immediately made their own thing, I think that makes Apple look like a jerk, really.
John:
Did they make their own thing or were they already making it?
John:
How long has this feature been?
John:
Again, Flux is an old application and there have probably been applications before, but I don't think the timing is they saw people side voting Flux and then they said, oh, we got to get on that and decided to add the feature.
John:
It seems like the type of thing that might have been in the works for a while, but who knows?
John:
honestly i disagree i i think it's exactly it's it's a simple enough feature that that is exactly what probably happened all right but so even if they did what then what difference does it make like the someone saw the idea this is this is a thing that users want uh again separate from the notion of telling flux they can't do it because that i agree is kind of jerky and annoying right
John:
telling flex they can't do it is separate from the idea of oh that's a good idea we should build that in because that's exactly how they should work if there's something that's a really popular idea that is very much a system level thing which i'm amazed that flex could even do what they did because it seems so much like a system level thing right that should be built into the operating system and how do you find those things you either think of them yourself or you see that there's lots of user demand for this type of thing oh lots of people are interested in this feature we should build it into the stupid os and so they do
Marco:
I'm not saying Apple shouldn't have been allowed to do this.
Marco:
I'm not even saying they shouldn't have done it.
Marco:
But the timing of it, the way they did it, and the timing of it, I think is distasteful and makes them look pretty jerky.
John:
I disagree.
John:
I don't think they look any more or less like jerks.
John:
The thing that makes them look like jerks is not letting them sideload.
John:
incorporating the feature in the os makes them look like smart os vendors i don't think it makes them look like jerks i don't think there's any timing i don't think if they even said uh we exactly copied this we were inspired by flux and if they came out publicly and said that the story you're surmising is true i still think that would be fine because i think that's like that's this is a consequence of the idea of people not owning ideas like you want people not own ideas but it still seems distasteful to you that someone came up with this thing and that like that they you know immediately copied it from them it's not
John:
there's nothing you know it's they didn't own it it's it's the transfer of ideas it's the reason the reason i at least am against patents is the idea that someone will have an idea another person will hear that idea and say that's a good idea and take that idea and run with it and like it's not theirs to to own and there's no copying going on it's a shared anyway whatever hippy dippy stuff
Marco:
I should point out, like, I did a very similar feature at Instapaper, like, five years ago.
Marco:
Like, it's not new.
John:
Yeah, it's not, like I said, it's not a new idea to computing.
John:
It's not a new idea to, like, non-computing-related lights.
John:
Like, the whole light theory, I don't know, there was probably some study many, many, many years ago about color temperature and light affecting sleep patterns that all this has spun out from.
Yeah.
John:
But, yeah, like I don't – and that's why I fear if – I don't know if someone will send us the link.
John:
I fear that Flux actually does have a patent on this because, seriously, like it should not be patentable, period.
John:
And even under the rules of our current patent system, it should have been rejected based on prior art.
John:
But, you know, that never happens.
Marco:
It doesn't mean anything.
Marco:
Anyway, so I do want to get into slightly a discussion of the assumption or the scientific basis of this.
Marco:
So first of all, just to clarify, when we say changes the color temperature, for anybody who doesn't know, if you've ever seen somebody buy a CFL or LED light bulb that looked really blue when you put it in the house, especially at night...
Marco:
Or if you have one that was like way too yellow or orange, you're kind of seeing the issues of color balance in our expectations.
Marco:
So basically, in the middle of the day, during daylight, daylight colored light is more towards the blue end of the color balance spectrum the way we normally think about it.
Marco:
And then at night, things like fires and old street lights and incandescent bulbs, those we think of as like, especially like the bulbs, we think of those as making like white light.
Marco:
But in reality, it's really most, it's more yellow tinted than daylight is.
Marco:
And so our eyes adjust for this.
Marco:
Cameras adjust for it.
Marco:
This is about white balances and cameras.
Marco:
Our eyes adjust for this.
Marco:
And so we think when we're sitting in a room lit by slightly yellow incandescent lights at nighttime when it's dark outside, we don't think of it as being a yellow light.
Marco:
We think of it as being a neutral white light.
Marco:
But then if you see something that is neutral colored like daylight, it looks blue to you by comparison because you've adjusted to that orange.
Marco:
So anyway...
Marco:
The principle behind this is that your computer screens, they don't change their color tone without this.
Marco:
They don't change their color tone throughout the day so that what looks like a neutral white color balance during the day on a computer screen does look bluish or too bright.
Marco:
It can be perceived as, and it's kind of tricky, but it looks like too harsh or too blue or too bright in a dimly lit nighttime room.
Marco:
for the most part.
Marco:
And the idea here is that this can confuse your body into not preparing for sleep or not sleeping as well or something like that.
Marco:
And I've looked into, I've tried to see what the scientific basis for this is, because the idea is that if you can make the screen shift its color temperature to
Marco:
into the warm area.
Marco:
So basically make your computer devices change their own white balance along with what's going on in your house and around you and your environment so that in the daytime they're neutral and what we might consider a bluish or cold white, but then at night they shift and everything gets tinted yellow.
Marco:
The idea that that will help you sleep, I'm not entirely sure that the evidence I've seen so far proves that.
Marco:
I think it's a good theory.
Marco:
It might be true.
Marco:
The studies that are cited everywhere mostly seem to indicate that brightness of light is important.
Marco:
So it might not be important to change your lights to be more yellow at night.
Marco:
It might just be important to avoid bright screens at night.
Marco:
and using bright screens like in bed or before bed or whatever.
Marco:
That, I think, makes... From the actual study that I've been able to find, which is pretty few and far between, but the Flux site has a good list of them, bright light-emitting devices are a problem to use late at night for this purpose, but it doesn't necessarily follow that changing the color temperature of those screens fixes that problem.
Marco:
The studies I'm looking at, like the one that Flux posted most recently on... Is it...
Marco:
public national academy of sciences anyway i read that one and that was like you know ipad versus book and it's like if you read an ipad for four hours versus before bed versus if you read a book for four hours before going to bed like the ipad users measurably had like worse sleep and and related issues and
Marco:
I thought at first, like, you know, maybe they're just measuring, like, if you're, like, bouncing around with apps, that's engaging your brain a different way.
Marco:
But no, it sounds like they controlled for that.
Marco:
They had people watching to make sure that you're actually reading a book.
Marco:
But it's like, if you're staring at an iPad screen for four hours before bed versus reading a book, reading the book is better.
Marco:
But they didn't test if you stare at an iPad screen...
Marco:
neutral color temperature versus one that is slowly shifting itself yellow, they didn't say that was better.
Marco:
So it seems like this is two separate things that the studies that have been done so far show that bright lights at night can hurt your sleeping
Marco:
And also, we think it's more pleasant and easier on your brain to tint things yellow, but nothing has actually proven that.
Marco:
And Apple's wording on the feature is actually very carefully aligned with this.
Marco:
So it says, many studies have shown that exposure to bright blue light in the evening can affect your circadian rhythms and make it harder to fall asleep.
Marco:
Night shift uses your iOS device as clock and geolocation, blah, blah, blah.
Marco:
It automatically shifts the colors in your display to the warmer end of the spectrum, making it easier on your eyes.
Marco:
It doesn't say that the color shift will make it easier to fall asleep.
Marco:
It says bright lights have been shown to make it harder to fall asleep.
John:
and this will be easier on your eyes but there's no connection to sleep there i'm surprised they can't get sued sued for easier on your eyes because like i don't even know if that's supportable you get more yellowish is easier on your eyes how is that i maybe it's because it's not measurable that's why it's that's why it's supportable because like it's vague enough you're like well what does easier mean uh so maybe it's it's vague enough that they're okay but
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And there's all sorts of theories about – that's why you see a lot of yellow-tinted sunglasses, theories about if you reduce the blue light more than the other colors, it's easier on the eyes.
Marco:
There are other things about that, but I don't – and so I think that's probably backed up, but it doesn't seem like this is connected necessarily.
Marco:
So I think if you're concerned about this –
Marco:
Sure, try Flux or try this Trinite Shift.
Marco:
If you find it pleasant, great.
Marco:
You know, that's a separate thing.
Marco:
It might not be helping you sleep, but I think if you want to sleep, we do have evidence so far, it seems, that either reducing the brightness of the screen is probably way more important.
John:
The screen already does that automatically to some degree.
John:
You can pick your brightness, but it does adjust based on ambient temperature within some range.
Marco:
Sure, but I would say reduce the brightness, especially at night.
Marco:
Either keep it low all the time like I do, or just set it lower at night, even setting the middle point lower.
Marco:
Or just if you're concerned about this, and maybe you should be, just don't use your devices before bed because the studies are pretty clear that that helps a lot.
Marco:
But I don't think we know that changing it to yellow has a meaningful effect on the quality of your sleep.
Marco:
It might be more pleasant, but it might not have a meaningful effect here.
John:
But if you believe it will, then it will, because the placebo effect is incredibly strong.
John:
And so like there's two aspects.
John:
One, some people just find it more pleasant.
John:
Like they just like it.
John:
It's like you call it fashion or aesthetics or just gives them a warm, fuzzy feeling.
John:
They just like that's fine.
John:
Right.
John:
And the other one is if they believe it will give them better sleep, there is a chance that that belief will cause them to have better sleep.
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
But it could be just like if you start thinking about having better sleep and wanting to make changes in your life to give you better sleep, you will probably make other changes that will also give you better sleep.
Marco:
So if you want better sleep, chances are you should be doing multiple things.
Marco:
And one of those might be don't be like reading your phone every single second at night until the second you go to bed.
John:
I have the opposite of the placebo effect because I do – usually the last thing I do right before I go to bed is look at an iOS device, which is pretty bright in a pretty dark room.
John:
And I've been doing this for just years and years and years, you know, since iOS has existed as a thing, since the iPod Touch has existed.
John:
And every so often I think –
John:
This is like exactly what they tell you what not to do.
John:
Like a bright, mostly white light in your face, like right before bed.
John:
I wonder if this is making me not be able to sleep.
John:
Then I go to sleep instantly.
John:
So like every once in a while I think about it.
John:
It's like I'm trying to convince myself that what I'm doing is going to be harmful and I sleep fine.
John:
So it's funny how that is.
Marco:
If Apple, you know, maybe the Apple feature does more.
Marco:
Like, maybe it also adjusts the brightness.
Marco:
If not, maybe it should.
Marco:
Like, that would be, like, if it also reduce, like what I just said, like, you know, like, reduce the brightness of your screen at night also in addition to, like, the automatic thing.
Marco:
The brightness range.
Marco:
yeah like basically move the slider for you yeah like move move like the set point down also like or yeah move move the whole range down if it also does that automatically that's a lot more valuable and maybe it does i haven't tried it yet although i'd be like is my is my device getting dim what the hell oh it's that stupid thing again
John:
I hate when my display looks too dim and I realize that a kid has leaned on the brightness button on my keyboard or something.
Marco:
For a long time, many people have complained, and I agree with this complaint, that the lowest brightness setting on iOS device screens often isn't low enough.
Marco:
If you're in a room where that is the only illumination, like if you're reading in bed at night, the lowest brightness setting is often still too bright, especially if you're using an app with a white background.
Marco:
And there's been all sorts of people who will use the accessibility toggles to try to make it even dimmer, which messes with my app, and then they send me bug reports.
Marco:
There's all sorts of people who have been doing this for years, of using special accessibility settings or special app features to try to reduce it even further.
Marco:
I mean, in an old version of Instapaper, when I first introduced Dark Mode, in order to get around this problem, I actually had...
Marco:
a a translucent black layer that i could put over the entire window like just just a giant ui view over the entire window or or a layer i forget which one but just like a giant overlay that i could that i could just you know dim as necessary in dark mode because the entire interface was not dim enough uh on especially like on an ipad where you have this giant giant bright screen it's way more of a problem on ipads than it is on iphones
John:
Most people should just go into another room because I think the bottom brightness setting is too dim to look at.
John:
Like there's two things that are here.
John:
One is, is it putting off enough light to annoy another person who's trying to sleep in the room?
John:
Yes, I grant you it's doing that.
John:
But the other is, does it look like a normal screen or does it look like a screen that's broken?
John:
And when you put the brightness of the bottom setting in any iOS device, it basically looks broken.
John:
Like things don't look right anymore.
John:
It's not just a dimmer version of the screen.
John:
Now you're changing it in a material way.
John:
There are things that you can't read because the contrast is too low.
John:
Everything is super dark.
John:
It does not look like a slightly dimmer version.
John:
What I thought you were going to say about the screens is, and I've heard this complaint as well, is that with the dawning of LED backlights many years ago on most devices...
John:
um they go way too high like the top brightness setting is blinding in noon in the noonday sun you have to put it on max brightness and like these like uh monitors from uh uh random brands that are not like apple monitors or dell or hp but just i mean you know it's
Marco:
brands that you've never heard of they have these really cheap monitors and their top brightness setting you can like cook eggs with it like they're just they get really really bright no i mean even apples like my i have my my 5k my 5k is set to just one notch above the middle yeah because like the it's way too bright if i set it up more than that
John:
Yeah, it's just, it's crazy bright, which is good.
John:
I like having that headroom, I guess.
John:
I mean, and maybe you still want it, like, you know, I said noonday sun, but if you actually have your iPhone 6 out in the noonday sun and put it in max brightness, you'll see it's actually not that bright after all compared to the sun.
John:
Right.
Marco:
I mean, that's the thing, like, they do this, it makes a lot of sense on portable devices, especially because if you have to use it outside in sunlight, you really need every bit of brightness you can get.
John:
but what you need there and what you need there is a different display tech because lcds as you crank the brightness you're just kit like if you have a completely black screen and you crank the brightness to max that you can use a black led uh backlit screen completely black one as a flashlight in a dark room because that's how much light just comes through it is because it's basically the backlight is on behind every single pixel and the little liquid crystal things are trying not to light the light through but they do which is why plasma tvs look better um so oled doesn't have that problem because
John:
It is just cause not causing the pixels that are not lit up.
John:
They're just not emitting any light.
John:
There's no light behind them.
John:
They don't have to block anything.
John:
They're just not putting it like a plasma.
John:
They're just not putting out any light.
John:
So the move to OLED could help because if you, if you did have like, Oh, I'm cranking my iPhone six brightness in the noonday sun.
John:
And I still can't see the screen.
John:
Even if you put a backlight behind it, it was this gigantic, super bright backlight.
John:
the contrast between the white regions and the black would still be basically the same ratio.
John:
And so it would still look all washed out in the noonday sun.
John:
What you really need is to say, this is, you know, you can turn the backlight down to a degree where the LCD screen can block the light going through because the light is so wimpy that it doesn't go through, but the room is so dark that where it does come through, you get a better contrast ratio.
John:
So different display tech, and this is even before you get to reflect the display tech, which of course is a real way to go where there's not actually light coming from behind it, but like a Kindle,
John:
you're relying on the sunlight coming down and bouncing off and you just make regions of it black so it doesn't bounce off as much and then you get something that acts like yay an actual book a paper book where it becomes more readable in sunrise instead of less but we do not have a good hybrid between backlit and reflective screens there are a lot of ones that have been tried involving either ink and lcd or combinations of various other tech and none of them are mainstream yet so we'll still wait for that but in the meantime oled is the next significant step in this area that should really help
Casey:
Um, on this week's connected, uh, Federico talks a bit about night shift and he had said that he had been using it for a while.
Casey:
And then he went back to, uh, I think he had turned it off or something like that.
Casey:
And he said, I think he had said that it was like getting stabbed in the eye because, you know, Federico doesn't believe in sleeping when the rest of Italy sleeps.
Casey:
He sleeps when we sleep and,
Casey:
And so he said it was really jarring when he had turned it off in the middle of the night.
Casey:
So whether or not it's real, it certainly is a strong placebo from what I can tell.
Marco:
I mean, it's also just like, as I mentioned, like your eyes adjust to it.
Marco:
Your eyes have auto white balance in camera terms.
Marco:
The difference when you're not adjusted, it's a huge difference.
Marco:
And the easiest way to see this difference is if you have a camera, set the white balance on it manually to daylight.
Marco:
and take a picture outside during daylight, and it should look normal.
Marco:
Then, with it still set to daylight, take a picture inside your house at night, and everything will look insanely yellow.
Marco:
It's a huge difference.
Marco:
This is not a subtle shift in colors.
Marco:
It's a massive difference.
Marco:
If you are just using your device one night with this feature enabled the whole night,
Marco:
And the next night, you have the feature disabled the whole night.
Marco:
You might not even notice the difference, because your eyes are adjusting as night falls the entire time as this thing is happening.
Marco:
It's a slow change.
Marco:
But if you then immediately, while your eyes are adjusted to the warm color, immediately see cool colors, then it's going to be very jarring.
Marco:
I don't think that necessarily says, like, how big of a difference this makes or whatever.
Marco:
I think it's just like, yeah, the shift is a big shift.
Marco:
You know, but...
Marco:
I don't think we have anything to show that this is super effective.
Marco:
I think it's primarily an aesthetic preference, and then it might be related to eye strain or the ease on your eyes.
Marco:
But yeah, the connection to sleep quality, I think, is still very unproven.
Yeah.
Casey:
So we're running a bit long and I'd like to wrap somewhat soon, but I really wanted to at least bring up this multi-user iPad thing for the classroom.
Casey:
So apparently there's going to be a whole bunch of changes for using iPads in the classroom.
Casey:
And again,
Casey:
This was covered in the most recent episode of Connected where Fraser Spears showed up.
Casey:
And it genuinely seems really, really interesting, some of the stuff they're doing.
Casey:
Teachers can look at their pupil screens.
Casey:
We're not sure if that's live or if it's just like a snapshot.
Casey:
There's multi-user iPads, so a user can log into any iPad and get their home folder, so to speak, on that iPad.
Casey:
We don't know a whole lot about it, but it seems really interesting.
Casey:
I'm fascinated to hear the reports from the field how this works, but I'm very skeptical it'll ever land on regular consumer iPads.
Casey:
What do you guys think?
John:
Oh, it's got to come to regular.
John:
This is like bigger iPads.
John:
It's guaranteed this is going to come eventually.
John:
It's just a question of when.
John:
Because us, enough iPads are shared devices in families, even if it's just like the three kids fighting over the two generations old iPad that has been handed down to them.
John:
um yeah they just need that like it they've they've needed this feature for a long time and it seems like it's not it seems like it shouldn't be too hard to do like it doesn't break any sort of ui paradigm they could just have an app for switching or whatever like it's because once you're using it as a user it's just like a regular ipad and the only context switch is oh well you know now your sister wants it so give it to her and then she launches that same app and
John:
taps on her icon and now it's her ipad and they have to fight over storage space and you use icloud to mitigate that and what happens if you don't have enough room in icloud then when your sister logs in you lose your save data because it can get uploaded to icloud and you know there are details to work out here and there uh but this seems like a very obvious feature that needs to come time especially if ipads continue to you know
John:
be more sophisticated in the ipad pro and everything multiple users is a thing that we know is useful for large devices that multiple people might use like imax or even laptops or even ipad pros i'm not sure i would assume that it's definitely coming to like regular consumer ipads i mean you know setting up the education environment is presumably like a big provisioning thing i like
Marco:
I would imagine this is the kind of thing that it does look like it's very useful for education, but I'm not really sure Apple cares enough about enabling multi-user iPads in people's houses.
Marco:
Because right now, the way it's solved is either it's not solved and you just stay logged in as one person and everyone just ruins all your high scores, or...
Marco:
people get different iPads for different people.
Marco:
And that's presumably what Apple wants.
Marco:
Apple wants everyone to have their own iPad.
Marco:
I'm not sure, because if you think about what's involved in this in a home environment, without the central management of what the school is doing, in a home environment, what's involved here is things that are really messy in iOS today, such as having multiple iTunes Store accounts logged into the same device, apps from different people installed or from different accounts installed,
John:
yeah but that's all been solved in os 10 i mean like it's the same underpinnings you have multi it's a multi-user system you have separate you know the directories and accounts and sandboxes and yeah you can have two people logged in to different apple ids and different accounts into the store like it just seems like this is all there's no tech reason there's very little ui reason the only reason it hasn't been done so far is because it's not really an important feature but it's one of those ones that i feel like they're going to get around to eventually and
John:
I don't think anyone has ever not purchased another iPad because their current one.
John:
They would say, well, we were going to get another iPad, but this one has multiple users.
John:
No, kids will still complain to them with multiple users.
John:
Forget it.
John:
If you can afford it, you buy one.
John:
If you can afford it and you don't want it, you buy one.
John:
If you can't afford it and don't want it, you don't buy one.
John:
All this is going to do is make lives...
John:
a little bit better for people who don't want to buy another ipad and do want their kids to share it and are sick of hearing people complain about it he broke my mind minecraft uh castles or he uh messed with my high scores or deleted the app that i want or read my texts or whatever complaints people are going to have um i i just think it has to come but not anytime soon i'm not saying it's even this year or next year but
John:
you know eventually there's going to be ios version 13 and they're going to need features for it and this is going to be one of them yeah maybe but i i it's the kind of thing where like the amount of work it takes to have like you know to separate out like all the icloud and and app store stuff with multiple logins and ios like the the amount of work that's going to take but isn't that already done don't you think it's already done like aren't no aren't we essentially aren't we essentially using a multi-user system that just has one user on it
Marco:
Well, it's done at the level of, like, the Unix user level, sure.
Marco:
But I don't think it's done at, like, the, like, services integrations level.
Marco:
Like, I don't think... Yep, but why wouldn't it be done at that level?
Marco:
Because those same demons are running OS X.
Marco:
Well, first of all, it doesn't work that great on iOS 10 a lot of times, but it's a very different environment.
Marco:
But keep in mind on iOS, this is also the part of iOS that not only relies on that big, messy store and iCloud backend that's really hard to get anything out of, but also this seems to be the buggiest part of iOS, is the part that manages your account logins to these backends.
Marco:
It is so always fraught with minor bugs that pop up at the dialogues for you to log in all the time and everything.
John:
Yeah, it does that, like you said, it does that on the Mac too.
Marco:
Yeah, and that part of iOS is a mess, and it's probably a mess for a good reason.
Marco:
It's probably a mess because it would be so much work to fix it that they just will never get around to improving it.
Marco:
Like, I don't know, infinite timescale.
Marco:
I mean, you know, I'm exactly never saying never, but like... But why is it a mess on the Mac?
John:
Like, it just seems like what I would expect...
John:
for them to implement the multi-user feature there may be some things that they that they where they cut corners where they'd have to go back in and fix stuff but for the most part what you'd end up with two is with two separate messes you'd have multiple users both of which would experience the weather that we talked about on the past show where sometimes it keeps asking you for your password and they would both experience that they would both get their own little private experience of those bugs but i but i don't see that as an impediment to them both having their own private experience of those bugs
Casey:
I think you're making very bold assumptions that, like Marco said, the Unix underpinnings of iOS have ridden all the way to the user-facing portions of iOS.
Casey:
If I were Apple and I was writing iOS code way back when, when it wasn't even a thought that there would be multiple users...
Casey:
You bet I would probably be taking shortcuts to try to get things out the door quickly that assume that there will only ever be one user to any of these systems.
Casey:
I really think that Marco is right.
Casey:
It's going to be a long time before we see this.
John:
No, but Sierra, I agree with that, that they did take those shortcuts.
John:
iOS 1.0 or iPhone OS, the original iPhone OS, all it was was just a massive collection of shortcuts.
John:
It had to be to even get things to work.
John:
But this feature in iOS 9.3 shows that they've actually done the work already.
John:
And it's only a question like they had to have done the work because, hey, look, multiple users.
John:
And yet it's for enterprise and classroom and server and cloud.
John:
And it's aimed at a different user base or whatever.
John:
But they had to have done that work.
John:
They had to have gone through everything and said, find all those places where we cut corners because this thing isn't going to work at all.
John:
If when one student logs in, it sees the other person's stuff or if they can't log in to, you know, they're doing that.
John:
It is being done.
John:
And so once that's done, it's only a matter of time where they decide to eventually get around to giving you the version of this that's not just for classrooms.
Marco:
Well, I mean, it's done to some degree.
Marco:
I mean, none of us know.
Marco:
We should ask Fraser Spears.
Marco:
None of us know to what degree this is done.
Marco:
What is kept per user?
Marco:
What isn't?
Marco:
But is it down to the iCloud account level?
Marco:
Does every kid have their own iCloud account or just their own files?
Marco:
Probably, I don't know.
Marco:
I would guess it is done to a fairly shallow level.
Marco:
I would not expect this to be an easy way to just say, oh, we'll just take this and just enable it for everybody.
Marco:
I don't think it's going to be that simple.
John:
I just had a sad thought, which is their multi-user switching could basically erase everything about the previous user and go through a really fast first setup process.
John:
In other words, there's only ever one user, and switching involves deleting the user that was there and putting in another user.
John:
So it really is single user all the time, and all they do is delete everything having to do with one user.
John:
Really, I hope they didn't implant it that way, but that would probably work.
John:
I think Fraser said that might be actually how it is done.
John:
He was saying if there's not enough room for your stuff, the idea is that it'll take your stuff and put it in iCloud, which makes sense because if you switch accounts to somebody who has more stuff than can fit on the current iPad, you have to purge the old person's stuff, especially with a classroom because the iPad in a classroom doesn't have three users.
John:
It can have like 15 or 20.
John:
And so you can't fit 15 or 20 people's stuff on there.
John:
So as you change users, eventually someone's stuff's got to get purged.
John:
Um, but I'm thinking of like the scenario where every time you switch user, it says there used to be another user of this iPad, but forget they ever existed, delete all their stuff, push it up to the cloud, blah, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Um, and create a new user.
John:
And it's only ever a single user iPad.
John:
As far as the iPad is concerned, there's only ever been one user just changes periodically.
John:
And that would be depressing.
John:
And that would be a way to implement this as a shortcut, but I really hope they didn't do that.
Marco:
Honestly, I do think that in this day and age, it makes sense to do this in classrooms where you might have a bunch of devices stationary installed in a classroom, like in a lab or something like that, or you have to share them between people because you don't have enough.
Marco:
That probably happens a lot in education.
Marco:
I think in this day and age...
Marco:
i don't think we really need to be that concerned with multi-user use of today's ipads iphones and laptops like desktops maybe even laptops like most most people i i would love to have data on like what percentage of macs out there have more than one user account that ever they ever get used oh you wait till adam gets older and he wants to use your computer and suddenly you'll be thankful that you can give him his own account
Marco:
I'll just buy Casey's old iMac at that point and give him that.
John:
You'll just buy him his own computer, right?
John:
Yeah, you're going to put a computer in your seven-year-old's room and then come back and scrape the peanut butter off the screen periodically.
Marco:
That's what I do on iPads now.
Marco:
Well, not in his room, but yeah, I have to clean the peanut butter off of my iPad Air 2 now whenever he uses it.
John:
anyway multiple accounts i think is a good idea i don't think i i don't think it's going away and uh whether you think it's important for iphones and ipads as it exists now as the ipad pro continues to develop in that direction as it becomes a more viable desktop and laptop replacement i think it's inevitable but i i concede that i may be overestimating the sophistication of this multi-user implementation there may be a massive amount of work should be done i still think it will happen but let's just push the timeline out a few more years
Marco:
are we good all right thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week fracture blue apron and hover and we will see you next week now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental oh it was accidental
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because 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, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
I'm tired.
Marco:
You've probably been looking at too many blue screens.
Casey:
Yeah, probably.
Casey:
I feel like the last couple episodes have been pretty good.
Casey:
We can't put that in the show because that's, you know, too self-congratulatory.
Marco:
That's like saying, it's going to be a short show.
Casey:
Yeah, really.
Casey:
Yeah, it's true.
Casey:
Yeah, well, I had all this follow-up.
Casey:
Follow-up is back.
John:
follow-up was back with a vengeance today that's true well the the plex one was it was really a topic like that was just like more about plex well i mean both of you have very lots of difficulties with the concept of follow-up in the format why please educate us casey's uh tale of woe like it's just like well
John:
well, we usually start with follow-up, but instead we're going to start with this other thing, which is properly a topic.
John:
And then Plex and the Infuse app.
John:
Infuse app is a follow-up item.
John:
Let's talk about the Infuse app that people recommended.
John:
Here's how it worked for us, blah, blah, blah.
John:
But then the spinning off in two hairs, what you, you know, my complaints about Plex, I'm guilty too, because you lead me into it.
John:
Oh yeah, it's all our fault.
John:
How you use Plex and your guide to Plex and what you've heard, like Plex is a topic, your tale of woe is a topic.
John:
The follow-up item, you could have cleared this Infuse item in like, you know, two and a half minutes if we had just hit the bullet points.
John:
Anyway, we survive.
John:
The show survives.
John:
We soldier on.
Marco:
I was actually thinking as we were... I noticed as we were talking about Casey's IMAC for 40 minutes before we even began follow-up, I thought, you know, this is actually a better format.
Marco:
I kind of like having the follow-up after topic one because it gives you a chance to get into the show with something new first.
John:
no it doesn't chronologically speaking you hear the previous show and you're angry because they got a bunch of stuff wrong when the next episodes start you want to hear immediately that casey knows that he got the c-sharp thing wrong
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I put the tale of woe first because I thought it was more dramatic that way.
Casey:
But I did kind of like having a little something, a little appetizer before the follow up.
John:
But you always do that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, you always that's the format of this show is one of you has something to say before we begin the follow up and how long that thing is.
John:
It's fine.
John:
But it's usually an hour.
Yeah.
Casey:
This was my time to shine, John.
John:
Don't take it away from me.
John:
It's your time to cry about your poor iMac.
John:
How about that case, the box, though, the little trapezoid-y box thing?
Casey:
Yeah, very weird.
Casey:
I liked it, but very weird.
Casey:
Although, I tell you what, putting that junk back into the styrofoam, what a disaster, mostly because I'm an idiot when it came to that.
Casey:
Really?
John:
I found it very easy to repack an iMac.
John:
Yeah, I found it pretty easy, too.
John:
You just need practice.
Casey:
Yeah, well, I've never had to deal with it before.
John:
I've had to bring my Thunderbolt display back to the Apple store many times.
John:
So I've had to practice with that size and shape.
Casey:
Yeah, no, I just never done it before with something that shape.
Casey:
I mean, the last time I've had a desktop, it was a tower, which is a big rectangle.
Casey:
So it was very different for me.
John:
I don't quite understand the... Aesthetically, I understand the box, but usually the things Apple does with boxes are about fitting more in a shipping container, you know, basically like in less environmental waste, more things, you know, more product and less volume, right?
John:
But I really don't think they're packing these things up like, you know, top, bottom, top, bottom, top, bottom to try to get space savings.
John:
So all I see is that that wedge they cut out of it is just empty space in the shipping containers when they ship these.
John:
And you can only stack them one way now.
John:
Anyway, I...
John:
seems like it's just an aesthetic thing which i can buy but if there's some shipping related reason why they want that taper i'd love to hear it why would you wouldn't stack them like one right side up the next right upside down no no i don't i don't think they do that like i i would imagine that they're not meant to be shipped upside down right side up upside down rise it up it seems i think they are i bet they are i bet they are you think so
John:
because like like what do you think they fill the gaps with like a whole bunch of mighty mice like what just tosses and fill all the little triangles well that's what i'm saying like it just it just seemed like the apps the apps would be air i i would imagine that these things ship only in one orientation for just for like the security of like bouncing around in cargo containers but maybe they do ship fine upside down and they do alternate
Casey:
The chat room is very upset because you are very wrong, John.
John:
Oh, I'm wrong that they don't do upside down, right side up?
Casey:
You are wrong in saying that they are all right side up.
Casey:
They are wedged in one right side up, one upside down, as Marco and I suspected.
John:
Yeah, I don't know.
John:
I just thought they wouldn't do that.
John:
I thought that shipping them upside down would be bad.
John:
You know, the whole thing with this side up arrows on boxes that no one pays attention to.
John:
I still see them on boxes that come to my house, usually not facing up anymore.
Marco:
Well, imagine how bad it would be, though.
Marco:
Because, you know, however Apple ships them, that's definitely not how, like, UPS and FedEx are going to ship them.
Marco:
So, like, you know, imagine if you designed a computer and a shipping method of that computer such that it had to be kept a certain way up.
Marco:
Otherwise, it would just break.
John:
Well, it doesn't, like, have to be.
John:
It's just, like, that's the best orientation.
John:
It's the most secure.
John:
So when Apple controls the shipment, it's like that.
John:
But in the last mile, it's all over the place because they still double box it, though, right?
John:
Yes.
John:
But the outer box is also that same shape.
John:
Yeah.
Yep.
John:
The real reason for this, of course, is to make the giant wheel of IMAX that those guys made.
John:
If you just put them together, not alternating, eventually you get a big wheel that you can stand in and run around.
John:
Oh, that's awesome.
John:
Out on the quad in what I assume is their college, because this is where people have A, this many IMAX, and B, this much free time.
John:
yeah i think their key the key thing that they did either right or wrong depending on your look at is they used empty boxes and so they were held together they were held together with uh with like clear packing tape and everything and eventually the packing tape and like the boxes themselves structural integrity yeah but if you put an iMac in each one of those things that would have had some serious momentum if you could have ever got it moving yeah it would have been very heavy that'd be very expensive wheel