Wet Right Thumb
Marco:
I'm starting to think seasonal allergies are some kind of bullshit.
Marco:
Not that they're not real.
Marco:
So I have, in the last few years, gotten really bad seasonal allergies.
Marco:
And it seems like every single year, it is not only worse, but that everybody else is saying, oh, you know, I read or heard, blah, blah, blah.
Marco:
This is the worst year ever for pollen or whatever, whatever.
Casey:
Yeah, of course it is.
Marco:
How is every year the worst year ever?
Marco:
And this sounds like something is wrong.
John:
How is every year the hottest year ever?
John:
I don't know if they're linked together, but it could be that it makes for, you know, a greenhouse effect, let's call it.
John:
It might make for easier to have more growing things to produce more pollen.
John:
I have no idea if that is even...
Marco:
What I see is a problem that used to not exist as much, that now is exploding in existence, and it seems to affect tons of people.
Marco:
And the best thing we can do is take medicines that not only don't work...
Marco:
But when they don't work, the people who tell you to take them say, oh, well, it didn't work this time because you didn't start taking it a few weeks beforehand.
Marco:
Or, oh, you're building up a tolerance.
Marco:
It'll start working eventually.
Marco:
I mean, it's like, I feel like I'm spending whatever it is, $1.50 a day on these pills that do nothing.
Marco:
Every year, it's worse and worse.
Marco:
I...
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
So, I mean, when I was a kid, I used to take allergy shots because I had bad allergies and that made them a lot better.
Marco:
And I heard adults do allergy shots sometimes for seasonal allergies.
Marco:
Do any of you have, you in the chat, does anybody have experience with that?
Marco:
Because I would gladly do allergy shots again if it could fix this because every year, at least in the spring, sometimes also in the fall, I'm just useless for like two weeks and
Marco:
And with a combination of like sick kids season in the winter preceding this, it's just exhausting and it makes it hard to do anything.
Casey:
You should try some homeopathic, homeopathic, however you pronounce it.
Casey:
Some of those remedies because I hear they work really well.
Marco:
Oh, I'm already taking them by not taking them.
Casey:
i'm taking the maximum effective dose by not taking them at all right like divide by zero something like that works out right so uh let's do some follow-up and it starts with we got a lot of feedback about how walmart is energy efficient and i don't even recall having talked about that in the prior episode i remember talking about energy efficiency of course but i guess one of us made some sort of
John:
That was me.
John:
I threw Walmart under the bus because they're the standard bearer for a terrible, giant American company, right?
John:
And so I just assumed that they were also the type of company that would pinch pennies and not bother investing in green energy.
John:
But that is not the case.
John:
We will link to...
John:
a uh walmart's website where they would talk about all their renewable plans they plan to be 100 on 100 renewable energy by 2020 so they're not quite where apple is today but they have plans to get there they have a whole big page on their website about sustainability
John:
uh i you know i i hesitate to say this because i'm sure we'll just get more email from people telling me that walmart doesn't do anything bad ever well that's not true i only wish that their sustainability that they have on this page extended to the sustainability of their workforce as in paying them enough to be alive and healthy and not relying on uh
John:
Well, if they can't get pay and benefits through us, the government will pick up the slack.
John:
Anyway, I don't like Walmart.
John:
Have you noticed?
John:
But they are actually doing solar stuff.
John:
So I was wrong on that.
John:
So there you go.
John:
Walmart boosters.
John:
They're out there.
Marco:
In Walmart's defense, which is probably a phrase you will never hear me say again.
Marco:
but in walmart's defense um if you look at other retailers like amazon for instance uh it's often not a lot better it's it's mostly what's mostly at fault here is retail is a terrible and extremely cutthroat business and government regulations on things like minimum wage simply don't go far enough okay please email us next topic
John:
Well, I wouldn't call that in Walmart's defense.
John:
That would just be saying like Walmart does bad things and also other people do too.
John:
And so they're also bad.
John:
It doesn't make them any better to find other people who do the bad thing.
John:
And we're not going to get into like, well, if the minimum wage is like, well, if my competitors can pay their employees this low and we don't, we're going to go out of business anyway.
John:
Yes, there's lots of blame to go around, but Walmart is far from blameless.
John:
But they do put solar panels on the roof of things, so they've got that going for them.
John:
One thing they do, okay.
Casey:
Whee!
Casey:
All right, so why don't you tell us about USB ports on the iPad Pro, because apparently we're all confused about it.
John:
we are no i'm not confused i i was just thinking about it the other day it's not what you think it's not like oh the usb 2 speeds on the the 9.7 inch ipad and stuff like that what i was thinking about is you've got this relatively huge ipad pro the big one and even the you know the regular size ipad has a lot of room on it and these days the only thing on them and now that they've removed like the rotation lock and everything is like
John:
power volume um uh and of course the you know the home button the touch id sensor but then this one tiny little lightning port on the side and i was like well what's what's the next step for the big ipad pro um you got keyboards you can attach to them it's got a smart connector on the side uh you know it's got a stylus
John:
and i was i was mostly inspired by marco talking last week about oh you could always hook up usb things to ipads and ios devices and they would just magically work if you could somehow find a way to power them if they if they didn't get enough power from the port and stuff like that like the drivers are all in there um so the big ipad pro why would you not have actual usb ports on it
John:
I mean, I guess not more than one because you wouldn't want it to be more powerful than a MacBook one.
John:
Right.
John:
But anyway, why wouldn't you, you know, as opposed to having a camera adapter and all this other stuff like, you know, or an SD card slot, but there's just so much freaking room on the big iPad Pro.
John:
um but as far as usb uh connectors apple is painted itself into kind of a corner with the lightning thing because the practical reason why you wouldn't put usb connectors on the ipad is if you did put them there they'd be usb type c and usb type c looks a hell of a lot like lightning and i can just imagine people jamming their lightning into the usb c ports or vice versa
John:
And that's like a nightmare as a usability.
John:
I mean, how could you distinguish between those two ports?
John:
They are different sizes, physically speaking, and probably the big one can't fit into the small one.
John:
But I don't think that's the reason.
John:
Well, right.
John:
But I mean, I think it would be a natural evolution of especially the very big iPad Pro to have actual USB ports on eventually, right?
John:
But I don't see how that can happen when lightning looks so much like USB-C.
John:
So I wonder...
John:
how apple will square that and if the answer is oh we're never going to have more than a lightning port on that i'm not entirely sure that's the best long-term answer if they really want especially the big ipad pro to become a more and more of a viable laptop replacement ultimately there are so many reasons why you could you could you can conceivably think of why apple would not be putting usb ports on ipads uh and and ios devices in general uh
John:
But why wouldn't you put it on the big one long term?
John:
Like I understand obviously why you're not going to put it on like most of the iOS line.
John:
But when you get up into something that's so big that it's so obviously not intended to be just a slip it into your bag type of thing.
John:
But it's like it's the size of a laptop.
John:
Why does that not get one, I guess, you know, Thunderbolt 3 port or whatever?
John:
Because there's so much you can do.
John:
Like there's so many doors that opens in terms of how usable is it on your desk as opposed to when you're walking around with it that it's almost a shame to be constrained by lightning forever.
Marco:
I mean, it's possible they will at some point.
Marco:
Never say never with Apple, and especially with a product line that is kind of on the way down sales-wise.
Marco:
Apple has done a lot of things with the recent iPads that we thought they'd never do in an effort to broaden it or help it find its feet or help increase sales in some way or another.
Marco:
So I think they very well might do something like that in the future.
Marco:
I think there's lots of reasons why they haven't done it so far.
Marco:
And I think they can very easily get past the physical challenges of how do you fit a port and then how do you avoid confusion with the other port.
Marco:
I think they can get around that with, you know, either by punting and not solving the problem and just putting a USB-C port on there, which is not that unlikely, or just, you know, ship a dongle or something.
Marco:
I mean, you know, they are, you know, make a new standard of USB micro C and, you know, declare it an industry standard, even though nothing else besides Apple devices will have it for three years.
Marco:
And, you know, then that's, you know, they could solve that problem like that.
Marco:
That is not the reason they're not doing it.
Marco:
And if they wanted to do it, they would get around that problem.
John:
yeah i would i would like to see how they would get around with it because usb type c seems like i mean supposedly apple had a lot of influence on that connector it looks a lot like lightning it's a from all accounts a pretty good connector uh as far as those things go having to come up with a new one just because the existing one that hopefully by that point everybody in the industry actually uses and it really is industry standard because apple didn't make it up having just having to come up with one more weird connector i don't know
John:
It seems like a shame to me.
John:
It seems like a shame in the same way that it has always been a shame and continues to be a shame that Microsoft chose the same modifier key as Unix, meaning that you want to do Unix-y stuff on Windows.
John:
It's a battle between the Unix-y environment and the Windows environment of like, you know, control C. Does that mean, you know, send the interrupt signal or copy text?
John:
Yeah.
John:
you know it depends on where you are whereas apple through mostly accidents of history happened to not have that problem because the mac operating system uses the command key uh and to a much much lesser extent the control key so the control key is almost entirely available to the unix environment so when they did
John:
the chocolate and peanut butter combination that is or was mac os 10 and now is os 10 it was beautiful and you didn't have to worry about that conflict and i feel like apple is on the windows control key for the os side of the equation with its lightning ports basically making it a little bit extra bit of a pain in the butt
John:
Now they have a problem to solve, whereas these devices that are just USB-C from top to bottom won't have that problem to solve.
John:
Their only problem will be like, how many of these USB-C ports do we put on our cool new laptop replacement tablet thing?
John:
I forget if the Surface has USB-C.
John:
ports on it but anyway if they wanted to it seems like a thing they could do much more easily than apple and it's one of those problems where it's like well couldn't windows have changed that but they added the windows key they could have changed their modifier but it's just it has so much inertia and it would annoy so many people that windows continues to lurch along with the control key being the modifier for everything
Marco:
Well, don't worry.
John:
Windows will never have any kind of Unix support.
John:
Yeah, did you see that Ubuntu thing?
John:
Yeah, I know.
John:
It's, I don't think, I mean, that's, Unix is never going to change.
John:
You're not going to take the control key away from them.
John:
And in the grand scheme of things, it's a small issue, but it's one of those things that makes me happy about my combination of Mac and Unix every time I deal with it.
John:
And looking at the iPad and that lightning port and the USB-C port shape, it makes me furrow my brow a bit.
Marco:
So, I mean, this is not on our topic list, which is why I'm going to derail us into talking about it.
Marco:
Why do you think they haven't put a USB port on an iPad so far?
Marco:
And what do you think they could do with it?
Marco:
I mean, I think the former is easy to explain.
Marco:
Like, why they haven't done it so far, I think the big things are that it seemed like the past.
Marco:
They wanted to move forward from that and didn't want to build in support for all these devices and deal with all the technical and software complexity of that.
Marco:
And also, they kind of like things to be all kind of enclosed.
Marco:
For instance, one of the things that you would want a USB port for would be additional storage.
Marco:
And they don't want you to do that.
Marco:
They want you to buy it from them.
Marco:
So I think there's lots of reasons why they haven't done it before.
Marco:
What do you think could motivate them to add USB-like ports for kind of general use on the iPad Pro?
Yeah.
Casey:
I've seen people use the little camera connection kit that has a USB port on it.
Casey:
And the only time I think I've ever seen it was you doing live broadcasts when we're in San Francisco for WWDC.
Casey:
I know that Jason Snell has played around with it, as have others, but I cannot think of anyone other than you, Marco, that I've ever seen use the USB to Lightning or, in the past, USB to Dock connectors.
Casey:
So I just don't feel like there's much of a market for it.
Casey:
I can't think of anything...
Casey:
that I would want to plug into my iPad other than maybe the memory card from my camera or the camera itself, hence the dongle being called the camera connector.
Casey:
I don't see why one would want this.
John:
Well, it's a kind of – as with all these things, it's in a race with the – we talked about this many shows ago.
John:
It's in a race with the wireless technologies, right?
John:
So there's lots of wireless standards out there for everything from wireless display to wireless power to all – obviously, we have wireless networking, and that has become pervasive.
John:
Um, so it really kind of is a race between the eventual need to do some of the things that USB does on, uh, on tablet type devices and how long it takes for all those wireless standards to become, to, to reach their wifi moment where they finally become good enough for general use.
John:
And they just spread everywhere because no one loves wires.
John:
Like if you could have, I love wires, wireless display and, you know, wireless storage and wireless power, uh,
John:
So you just come up to your desk with your laptop and put it down and your big screen in front of you turns on.
John:
Like, of course, who wouldn't want that, right?
John:
I mean, especially with things like monitors that you plug into the wall.
John:
It's not like you have to recharge the batteries in your monitor.
John:
The monitor would still be plugged in.
John:
You just didn't have to deal with it.
John:
Anyway, we're not there yet, obviously, with those.
John:
But so setting that aside and the fact that that could swamp all of this, the reason you eventually want something like USB on...
John:
the big ipad or whatever is i mean it's the same reason they added a stylus right or they made the big version that they're they're extending these the capabilities of the device you know and or multitasking with a split screen they want people to be able to do things with these devices that they couldn't do with the simpler ones um and it's because they're becoming more powerful they're becoming you know that there was someone posted recently i think it was uh jeff atwood tweeted something about like
John:
Look at all of the CPUs that have ever been in, I think it was Microsoft Surface, or I forget what it was.
John:
Some other, you know, slim sort of something that people accept as a laptop replacement.
John:
And look at how many of them are slower than the iPad Pro, right?
John:
If the top end of technology in terms of computing power is not growing as fast as it used to, and we'll talk about Intel's TikTok stuff later in the show...
John:
uh eventually these things that are uh historically lesser devices laptops and eventually tablets and eventually supposedly phones uh will slowly creep up and start closing the gap um and you will be left with a situation where a big ipad pro can have all the power i mean if they just don't update the mac pro anymore eventually a big ipad pro will have all the power of the current mac pro because i'll never freaking update the machine again um
John:
And if you have a small, you know, it's again, if the price and size of compute starts dropping to zero...
John:
then you will want to have a little thing like that that you carry around with you in your bag that you chuck on your desk and that when you do so uh you can connect to all the peripherals that you'd want in a big desk environment you could have multiple monitors hooked up you can have larger storage you could have wired networking for faster transfers you could have all sorts of other peripherals and the question is do you need to plug them in or are they all wireless so at this point with today's technology a lot of them you need to plug in so that's why i'm saying like a thunderbolt 3 port like we keep saying usb but you know you'd hook it up and you'd have
John:
two external monitors maybe you hook it up and you have a big giant touchscreen that's like 27 inches that's you know like laid out on your table instead of being in front of you or whatever so you could do more complicated stuff and it's like why why wouldn't i have a desktop computer to that how can an ipad drive something drive peripherals that powerful eventually it will be able to
John:
um again especially if the top end uh it continues to grow more slowly than the bottom end so i feel like the functionality currently enabled by a thunderbolt port or a usb3 port inevitably will come to tablet class devices assuming tablet class devices still exist if not like vr devices or whatever the only question is when that comes to pass will we need to use the usb connector to do it or will it all be wireless or will there be some other standard
Marco:
So here's an interesting thought experiment.
Marco:
We've had wireless things in general, wireless protocols, wireless networking, wireless device interconnection standards, things like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi.
Marco:
We've had these things now for a long time in technology terms, over 10 years where we've had these things.
Marco:
Not only have they been possible, but they've been ubiquitous for over 10 years and very widely supported and really quite mature for what they are.
Marco:
And yet, if you look at the devices we use, with the exception of things that are fully integrated like iPads, but if you look at a laptop or a desktop computer, things that do connect to other peripherals or other pieces of hardware like monitors and stuff, almost all of that is still using wires that was using wires 10 years ago.
Marco:
It seems like...
Marco:
As the wireless things have gotten better, so have the wired versions of the various connection protocols and everything.
Marco:
And everyone's still using wires for lots of good reasons.
Marco:
Like, I love wires because they simply work better most of the time.
Marco:
Like, they're usually more reliable.
Marco:
They're often faster.
Marco:
They can go in places where wireless kind of can't, like, high-interference environments or, you know, certain restricted areas like planes or, you know, and so they need a bunch of wireless stuff.
Marco:
They have advantages in things like power delivery and battery usage and everything else.
Marco:
So wires are kind of, I think they're here to stay.
Marco:
Like everyone always assumes that in the future, everything will be wireless.
Marco:
You know, as you said, like, you know, interfacing with your monitor, interfacing with this stuff on your desk.
Marco:
But maybe that's not true.
Marco:
Maybe that's not a safe assumption because I think we've had long enough now with wireless interconnection things that have been possible.
Marco:
And yet we're still using wires for these things because they just work better.
John:
but no one uses wires for networking anymore they take the ethernet ports right off the devices like as soon as wi-fi was good enough not good because we always know it's flaky it's slower like we all know the limitations of wi-fi it's it's you know you get interference from your microwave oven and you have interference from your portable phones and your thing and you can't get on the network and you know you keep dropping off like wi-fi has problems but as soon as it got good enough people like well screw these things because no one wants to walk from place to place or run wires through their house or plug things in or whatever and
John:
I do all of those things.
John:
But some things, it's just not possible.
John:
Having the wireless display technology, all those sort of laptop docks that you see in offices and the many different incarnations they come in and then, no, I don't want a dock, I just want one cable to plug in or whatever it is, it's not that bad to plug something in.
John:
But if you told those people...
John:
in the same way that we told them hey every time you sit down at your desk you won't have to plug the ethernet cable in and out anymore it doesn't seem like a big deal like who cares i plug in one cable it's fine it's really convenient it's you know it works every time it's not a big deal but wi-fi just wiped all that stuff off the face of the earth there is no equivalent to wi-fi i would say bluetooth isn't even the equivalent to wi-fi because i think bluetooth is still not past the level of non-flakiness
John:
for anything except for devices that never move you know keyboards and mice i think people more or less except bluetooth but then there's the annoyance of the battery charging that wasn't there with wire so it has a downside so i feel like bluetooth is borderline but no other wireless technology for anything else like storage or monitors or anything like that is is you know is remotely uh up to the that uh the uh the net win that wi-fi was but it doesn't mean that they never will be i mean you just read any sci-fi book like
John:
technologically speaking there's no reason you couldn't have really sophisticated high speed ubiquitous short range high bandwidth wi-fi even the power delivery stuff so you're saying on a very long time scale it doesn't have to be that long i mean do you know people who use wireless charging for their phones
John:
does that really exist i mean like yeah like those stupid little pads yeah yeah i mean obviously you can buy them for apple devices too but most people who use them i would imagine using for some kind of android device that that is not a third party thing but it comes with the thing but i i know people who choose to do that like they're not that no one's forcing them to use that they find it convenient that when they come home they put all their devices on a big pad or they
John:
put it in a little cradle and it's like well if you're putting it in a cradle if there was a little plug at the bottom of the cradle wouldn't would it make a big difference if you plug it in and plug they're choosing and they're you know these are not always the biggest technology it's just more convenient when i have to deal with the plug i just put it on this thing and it charges it's not great it's slower it's not good enough for everybody yet but the fact that anybody chooses to do it in its current sad unsupported state shows that there is a desire for it so i feel like the
John:
the convenience hooks of all of those wireless things are impossible to resist as soon as they pass the minimum, you know, sort of reliability threshold.
John:
Um, and, and wifi is the best example.
John:
And I think the only one that has passed it in Bluetooth is, is on the border.
John:
Um,
John:
everything else it's like all right well keep revising the protocols and a few earlier doctors will try it and then you know revise revise revise we'll know when it crosses the threshold because apple will have it all over the place because apple doesn't want any ports on any of his devices they don't even want rotation lock switch for crying out loud that still drives me nuts there was no room on the side of the device it couldn't be a millimeter bigger sorry casey we had that empty space for the four speakers they need every millimeter of that empty space it's impossible to make the device different
Marco:
They should just have a mute switch bump.
Marco:
I mean, if they'll have a camera bump to accommodate that wide component, they should have a mute switch bump on the other side.
Marco:
Then it could be even.
John:
The mute switch is a bump.
John:
That's what makes it a switch.
John:
It sticks out, and you can slide it back and forth.
John:
They'll make it a touch ID button.
John:
You don't have to use your fingerprint to mute.
John:
It won't work if your hand's wet.
John:
yeah you know the wet hand trick though right what uh no you so the the problem with touch id sensors that people found as soon as they're introduced is they work fine but then you go do the dishes and then you try to unlock your phone and it doesn't work and you're annoyed and eventually your hands dry and it works again all you got to do is uh wet your hands a lot and then train it on your wet finger you can label it as you know wet right thumb and then you have your you will train it on your dry right thumb and you'll train it on your wet right thumb and both will work
Marco:
life hack well that was always my so there there was that there was that like court case or whatever where somebody at some point uh ruled that that the police can't ask you for your passcode but they can force you to use your fingerprint to unlock your phone so my my contingency plan in case i ever get questioned by the police and they forced me to access my phone suck your thumb what would be lick my finger for a second and then make touch id fail three times so then it would require the passcode and then i wouldn't have to let them in
John:
Just bring Casey with you and he'll spill water on your phone and they'll never be able to use it.
John:
You got to do that before the waterproof iPhone 7 comes out.
John:
Yeah, I think honestly, I think it's already too late because the 6S is already almost waterproof, right?
John:
Isn't it like fairly waterproof?
John:
I think it's only waterproof on YouTube.
John:
In the magic realm of YouTube, you can put it in a glass of water and it's fine.
John:
If you do it at home, it instantly dies.
Casey:
I don't even know where to go from here.
Casey:
Are we in follow-up?
Casey:
Are we like three topics deep?
Casey:
I don't even know what's happened to this show.
John:
We've got one item of follow-up left.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
When you're in charge, Marco, everything takes a turn.
John:
He's never in charge.
Marco:
No, this is a life lesson.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
I'm not in charge.
Marco:
I just kind of took charge because that's how life works.
Marco:
You need an agent of chaos, as they say.
Marco:
Yeah, something like that.
Marco:
No one ever grants you authority.
Marco:
You have to take it.
Casey:
All right, well, I'm taking authority and saying let's get through this one damn last piece of follow-up so we can get into the real topics.
Marco:
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Marco:
Terms and conditions do apply to that.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Casper for sponsoring our show this week.
Casey:
All right, John, your crowning moment has come.
Casey:
Tell us about what's going on with your TV.
John:
has it come we'll see um so more than a year ago because we revisited on the one year anniversary more than a year ago i banished my playstation 4 from my beautiful plasma television because mostly what i was doing with my playstation 4 was playing destiny and destiny had a heads-up display that's on screen the entire time you're playing um that is 100 opacity and doesn't move and doesn't change that much and it was uh burning in on my display and i revisited a year later to see if the retention had faded and it faded to be almost entirely invisible and
John:
to be replaced with the cartoon network logo which was also banished for my television uh anyway um so when i banished my ps4 i got a gaming monitor i brought it into another room and that's how i've been playing destiny still the main thing i do with my ps4 since then for more than a year now of course when i pulled my ps4 from the tv destiny was new to me it wasn't new but i got it around the time of the first expansion first yeah i think the first expansion um a little bit after and
John:
and i you know complained on the the bungee forums the bungee's the maker of the game and i say you know it would be nice if you had an option to make the hud translucent and or dim it or you know do some other thing that would help uh with burning and there's a it was a big thread in their forums mostly consisted of people who uh don't own plasma televisions telling everyone who does that they shouldn't anymore because they're bad and that's why they should get led televisions yeah
John:
helpful internet people it's just a bunch of you know kids like they don't they don't understand why anyone would want a plasma television that the only thing they care about is like my lcd television or they always call them led television is is great and they get into fights with each other and it's like kids kids calm down like stop fighting over what tv you have like we need to concentrate on bungee and say bungee this seems like an easy feature for you to add like translucency seems like it's within your grasp graphically speaking
John:
on the PlayStation 4 to make the HUD translucent or make it smaller or, you know, many games do this.
John:
They give you options to tweak your HUD, not necessarily for burning reasons, just for customization reasons, but yeah, it helps with burning as well.
Marco:
Well, you know, there is a second option here that they could have done.
Marco:
You know, just never let you stop playing Destiny because then it doesn't matter if it's burned into your TV.
Marco:
It's always showing anyway if you just always play Destiny.
Marco:
If you never use your TV for anything else, it still matters.
John:
You would think it wouldn't matter, but it does.
John:
And anyway, you got to stop sometime.
John:
Destiny is not the only thing I did on my television.
John:
Anyway, so the gaming monitor I got is obviously does not look as good as my television.
John:
The black levels are atrocious.
John:
The response time is better.
John:
But anyway, so that's how I've been playing Destiny for a year.
John:
And the big threat in the Bungie forums, Bungie, like...
John:
Has not really said anything official about the topic of like other than acknowledging we have heard you about this request.
John:
And, you know, they haven't said they didn't promise a very, very Apple like in terms of vague acknowledgement that the issue has been received, but no promises that it will ever be addressed, let alone what time.
John:
So imagine my surprise when here I am more than a year later, Bungie was previewing some of the content they're going to have in the April update to Destiny.
John:
And one of the first things they showed was the ability to turn off the HUD.
John:
That was mostly the feature they were touting because people who do movies within the game or take screenshots, you don't want to have the HUD there sort of making it less cinematic and making it look more like a game.
John:
So you can drop the HUD for nicer screenshots and movies and stuff.
John:
But there was also two other options of...
John:
you know full opacity high and low maybe there was a medium level didn't really get to see what those look like in the game but they were there settings wise so there will be options to turn down the hud i don't know if the low setting is low enough to prevent image retention but that's not my problem
John:
My first problem is that I spent a year playing Destiny connected to a gaming monitor, and I'm kind of used to it in terms of if I was to go back on the television, I would feel like I'm really far away from the screen, even though, you know, you can do the math that my television screen is much bigger.
John:
But the distance wise, I wouldn't be able to see as much detail.
John:
i'm used to being closer to the screen close enough to like see the pixels because it's not a retina display it's just you know a 1080 hd display just like my television but i'm sitting like two feet from it instead of eight feet away um and the other thing is when i mentioned potentially bringing the playstation 4 back in my wife uh said said that she was not for this idea because that will just lead to more fighting between my son who wants to play star wars battlefront and my daughter who wants to watch television shows so it's better when they can be in separate rooms each doing the thing they want to do without
John:
fighting over the big tv um so it seems to me that despite my dreams coming true here potentially the dimming might not be sufficient to prevent vernon and the other thing is and the other two issues are i'm kind of used to it i'm sitting two feet from my monitor i'm kind of used to playing that way at this point uh and for the the harmony of the family it may be better to keep my playstation 4 in here now if they come up with a playstation 4.5 as the rumors are that a slightly more powerful playstation 4
John:
uh with that more power potentially being helpful to the playstation vr which i may eventually buy i would buy a playstation 4.5 and connect it to the tv so we have two playstations and my son and i can play destiny at the same time finally uh and my wife would probably like that even less but i would kind of have a quote-unquote excuse well it's not i'm not just getting a second playstation this is the better playstation and where else am i going to put it uh we don't have room for another gaming monitor it's got to be connected to the tv so this is a complicated situation
John:
by the way somebody who bought a ps4 only a few months ago that really annoys me that rumor well it's only it's only a rumor now and the extra power like probably wouldn't be a big deal because it would probably just be for vr which you'll probably buy anyway honest you know like aren't you gonna buy playstation vr tip will make you buy it
Marco:
I would like to see it.
Marco:
I mean, I'm not sure I will buy it, but I think it's at least somewhat likely just because I don't plan to build a giant gaming PC to try out the Oculus.
Marco:
So this is kind of like the alternative to that for more casual people like me.
Marco:
So I think that's I would like to see it.
John:
yeah it's cheap enough that you're like you know what fine i'm gonna give it a try this is giving it an honest shot you know you're not gonna be like oh it would be better if i had a better playstation no it'll be you know it'll be what it is the experience will be consistent and you can try it out and find out if it's terrible or not so that's that's been my plan as well um but i would like a playstation 4.5 anyway
John:
the april update looks interesting uh one-to-one infusion i know i i knew i shouldn't have used that uh harrowed anglish of dristan that i had 320 drop that was just saving and saving it like just yesterday i was like you know what i should just infuse that into my 309 mita why the hell not i know i'm gonna lose a lot of points but pretty soon 330 335 stuff is gonna be dropping anyways there's no point in saving the 320 thank god i saved it one-to-one infusion coming in april this ends the gibberish portion of the episode yeah casey uh is john okay i don't know do you think should we call some
Casey:
hand on heart i'm not trying to be funny i really thought that i had just spaced out and the conversation went a totally different direction i was trying feverishly to catch up and figure out what the crap john was just saying and then oh oh he's just talking destiny again never mind
John:
Next we'll have Marco tell us about watch terminology.
John:
I can't even.
Casey:
I can't even.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So are we good with follow-up?
Casey:
Any other follow-up, gentlemen?
John:
We're all done.
Casey:
Excellent.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I don't recall exactly when this happened.
Casey:
I think it was a little over a week ago.
Casey:
But last episode, we were busy talking about the Apple events.
Casey:
We didn't get a chance to talk about it.
Casey:
Some things happened in the Node.js world last week.
Casey:
Some interesting things.
Casey:
We have a link in the show notes to HaneyCodes.net, which is sharing my experiences as a programmer in C-Sharp.net and engineering manager.
Casey:
And this person, whose name I don't know other than Haney, anyway, they wrote a very quick article about, or a reasonably quick article, about what happened on NPM.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I'm going to take a stab as the summarizer in chief, and you guys can interrupt when you're ready.
Casey:
There was a person who had put up a package called KIK, K-I-K, and the, what is it, a chat app or something like that?
Casey:
The people who run that got in touch with him and were upset that he had a package that I don't think in any way related to KIK, the app, had a package that just had the same name.
Casey:
And so they told him he should take it down.
Casey:
He said no.
Casey:
And then I guess they went to NPM, which is the package manager, Node package manager that you use with Node.
Casey:
And they got NPM to take it down.
Casey:
And he then, this gentleman, decided to rage quit NPM and remove all of his packages.
Casey:
So far, this is a kind of amusing but unremarkable story, except that one of the packages that he removed...
Casey:
was a package that—what was this called?
Marco:
LeftPad, was it?
Marco:
It was like a 12-line string function.
Casey:
Yes, you are right.
Casey:
It is called LeftPad.
Casey:
It is a 12-line or 11-line function that just pads a string on the left-hand side.
Casey:
And apparently a lot of very popular packages took this as a dependency.
Casey:
So in other words, when you're writing code in the modern times, you usually have a package manager, something like CocoaPods or NuGet or NPM—
Casey:
Or what does Perl use?
Casey:
Something ancient?
John:
Something ancient?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Everything in Perl's ancient.
John:
Something with actual tests that run against the code so you can tell it'll actually work.
Casey:
I couldn't resist.
Casey:
But that's CPAN, right?
Casey:
Or something like that?
John:
You got it.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So most modern development platforms and Perl have a package manager, and NPM is the one for this.
Casey:
And when you have this package manager, it makes it very easy to import somebody else's code.
Casey:
So apparently what all of these packages did, including...
Casey:
some very, very, very popular ones, was they imported this left pad package, and this entire package was 11 lines of code.
Casey:
Well, when this package disappeared, that meant that anyone who had already downloaded it was okay, but if you tried to, say, code on a new machine, or in many cases redeploy, then this package was gone, and all of a sudden everything broke.
Casey:
And because so many popular packages took this as a sub-dependency, if you will,
Casey:
like half of the Node ecosystem broke.
Casey:
And this was really chapping a lot of people's butts because a lot of the really smug developers, pretty much all of whom were right, said, why would you take an 11-line dependency?
Casey:
Why not just write those 11 lines yourself or just put them somewhere in your project, somewhere under your control?
Casey:
And there was a big kerfuffle about it.
Casey:
And as someone who has written a Node app, which is my blog...
Casey:
and I just recently re-ran Clock, which is count lines of code, on my blog, and I put up a short blog post about it, which we'll put in the show notes.
Casey:
The entirety of my blog engine, in terms of the things that I have written, is 850 lines of code.
Casey:
Then I did a count lines of code on my node modules folder, and that was 180,000 lines of code.
Casey:
So I'm not really one to throw stones on this issue, but...
Casey:
But nevertheless, I don't think it's really useful to poop all over package managers and the idea of taking dependencies just carte blanche.
Casey:
It's a bad idea.
Casey:
I don't think that's necessarily true.
Casey:
I do think, however, that taking an 11-line dependency is a bit ridiculous.
Casey:
So, Marco, as chief curmudgeon when it comes to these sorts of things, what are your thoughts?
Marco:
First of all, I think John might be even more curmudgeonly than me on this, but I'm at least better known for avoiding dependencies like this.
Marco:
And the reason why I avoid dependencies as much as I can is not because I've always been like this.
Marco:
It's because of experiences that I had, mostly during the early days of Tumblr.
Marco:
Lots of things that we used in the early days broke.
Marco:
Lots of third-party components, lots of
Marco:
application layer stuff, infrastructure components that were not very widely used or were very young or were not designed to be used at big scales.
Marco:
But most of the problems we had were third-party PHP modules, third-party PHP code written by other people that we imported so we wouldn't have to write our own functions for things like S3 or image resizing, stuff like that.
Marco:
We had so many problems with this code, especially the freaking Zend framework.
Marco:
I don't know if it's good now, but it sure wasn't then.
Marco:
We had so many problems with almost every third-party library that we used that we eventually just said, you know what, we're just going to not use any anymore because every time we would use one...
Marco:
Literally, not just sometimes, literally the majority of the time, six months later, we would be ripping it out and replacing it with either another third-party one that would break six months after that.
Marco:
Or finally, we'd write our own because they just were of low quality and were not designed for a high-needs environment or not designed for edge cases or whatever else.
Marco:
Because a lot of third-party code out there...
Marco:
There's this myth that open source stuff will be really well-tested and will be battle-hardened and you can rely on it more than stuff you write yourself.
Marco:
But that's only true sometimes.
Marco:
That's only true for some things.
Marco:
How true that is is a function of how popular that code is.
Marco:
So if you're using something that is in use by everybody from Facebook down to Casey's blog engine...
Marco:
chances are that's been well tested and the bugs have been found and the edge cases have been hit and you're not going to be the biggest person using it and you're not going to hit many problems.
Marco:
But when you're just pulling in third-party code from a lot of things, it's often hard to tell whether what you're pulling in is of that level of quality or not.
Marco:
And
Marco:
When you're in a young language or a module for doing something that most people don't need to do, kind of like a niche module.
Marco:
I don't know how to pronounce niche, by the way.
Marco:
It's niche, niche.
Marco:
I forget it.
Marco:
But every time I say it, I worry about that.
Casey:
I'm the same way.
Casey:
I'm right there with you.
Marco:
Good.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So we'll just agree that we're pronouncing it badly.
Marco:
Anyway...
Marco:
So the fewer people use the thing you're working on and the fewer big people use it, the less reliable it inherently is simply by being open source or a third party or whatever.
Marco:
So I just learned over time that I was better off writing stuff myself and avoiding dependencies.
Marco:
Even when they work well, they can cause issues, like when the version of something changes and it breaks other things.
Marco:
Package managers can solve problems like that most of the time, but I've never seen a single one that solved them all of the time in anything, Linux, languages.
Marco:
When you add dependencies like this willy-nilly, you're really just adding work and risk.
Marco:
And the idea that you won't be able to deploy your site
Marco:
onto new servers because the original host of this 11 line function took it down like that's crazy like there are so many problems with that that sound just crazy to me like why are you not in control of that i i don't know it as somebody who has run large-scale services before every dependency like that just to me is a huge liability and occasionally it is worth using third-party code but i think it's a lot less often than what people seem to be doing these days
John:
well everybody builds on top of something i mean it's not like you're saying well i was using the compiler that came with my system but eventually i learned i had to write my own compiler you know i was using the os to ship with my servers but eventually i learned that it's wasteful to try to rely on linux because you never know what the hell they're going to do and they can break your crap so it's better to write your own os like we all write we all go on top of something it's all just a question of where you draw that line and why so there's sort of
John:
for most of our lives been the idea that like no one's you're not going to write your own os and your own compiler uh and maybe you're not even gonna write your own web server but if you're writing web applications at a certain point around the web server code boundary then it's like now it's kind of more up for grabs do you use an application framework do you write your own framework and
John:
It was the type of thing where you can write your own web app framework.
John:
That's how all the ones we have got here.
John:
It doesn't take a 700-man team to do it.
John:
One person can do it.
John:
Yep, I did.
John:
If you use one of the popular third-party ones, chances... And you happen to be in a Marco's unfortunate-slash-fortunate situation of...
John:
You end up being, maybe perhaps unexpectedly, one of the biggest users of everything that you do because you are tremendous all of a sudden, the compounding growth or whatever.
Marco:
And let me point out, too, Tumblr was not that tremendous when we started hitting these problems.
Marco:
We probably had maybe 100,000 users when all this stuff started breaking.
Marco:
It wasn't that big of a service.
Marco:
Relative to what you consider a scaled or scalable web service, it was nothing.
John:
Well, I mean, sometimes when people start going to... Facebook is a great example.
John:
They were using a similar technology stack, and their solution was throw people and money at the problem to the point where they were compiling PHP into C++ and crazy stuff like that.
John:
That's another possible approach, you know?
John:
And I don't know if they decided to write everything themselves.
John:
They got down and said, we're going to rewrite the language ourselves, and what is that, hip-hop there, a replacement thing or whatever?
John:
But those, I feel like, are extremes.
John:
I think...
John:
For the most part, most companies that are doing web development, I don't know if I'm going to say for the most part, maybe it's 50-50, are using in-house web frameworks.
John:
In the modern era, though, there are so many popular web frameworks that work for so many needs that it's accepted that you're going to build on top of them.
John:
I think where there are two places where this silly JavaScript, well, maybe three places where this silly JavaScript fell down.
John:
Um, one is an area that I'm familiar with, uh, because JavaScript is a crap language that is missing really important things that people want.
John:
Right.
John:
And Pearl started out as a crap language that was missing many important things that people wanted.
John:
And still today is missing some things that people wanted, uh, which means that to sort of, to sort of round out your language, Ruby has this little bit of degree too, because they, they consider it an asset to sort of round out your language and make it, uh, habitable, you know, to make it comfortable, uh,
John:
There's a minimum amount of sort of furniture you need to buy for the house before you can move in, and it's not part of the language.
John:
It's done in libraries, right?
John:
So JavaScript is definitely in that situation, which is why there's all these things like CoffeeScript and TypeScript and other things that are like, try to make JavaScript feel nicer.
John:
Those aren't libraries, but the same idea that no one wants to just use JavaScript by itself because...
John:
even basic things like say left padding a string are not in the language or the standard library where standard library is defined as what you can run in a browser right so someone's got to write the stupid 11 line function right not in php they don't yeah or you know i know like the is array package they're talking about like this the common test that people want to do that's not in the language that it's easy to write but it's also easy to get wrong and it's just kind of like a basic thing right so you don't do that in php either
John:
yeah javascript nor pearl by the way javascript is in that position um and so that's why these things exist the second problem is the javascript community not sort of having their act together enough to realize all right so we have this language that has these gaps the best way to fill them is not with 10 billion individual dependencies each of which does one of those function like as a community they should have
John:
you know sort of come together and settled on some much larger libraries they're like and round out the javascript language for me lib 1.0 right and maybe the seven competing ones of those but that is much better than i'm gonna do left pad i'm gonna do sane regular expression matching you know i'm gonna do fake inheritance in a prototype based language and you know like everyone sort of
John:
Just doing the little tiny thing and having a million of those combined.
John:
And I think the third failure for all the people who got hit by this bug is people who grew up in an environment where the expectation is that you can run your deploy and part of the deployment or updating or syncing or whatever automated procedure they have that they're all happy with.
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
John:
you know you're building on top of pearl there are gaps in pearl and you're going to need to libraries there's web frameworks maybe you're writing your own you certainly you're building on top of some real basics like dbi and lwp or whatever the hell you know the sort of core foundational uh things that most people who use pearl want to do but if you're in a big important company
John:
you don't go out to cpan to get these packages right you have your own internal cpan mirror at your company checked into version control so you know exactly what the hell you're getting and nothing anybody can do on the internet it's going to change what you deploy like the only nothing is going to break your stuff based on what's on the internet and you maintain that mirror and you sync upstream and downstream and you like you control your own destiny it's tons of third-party software like a cpan mirror especially back in the old days was pretty darn big and it's like why do we have to have our own cpan mirror like
John:
Because you don't want to rely on stuff on the internet.
John:
I mean, for security reasons alone.
John:
So that the idea that pulling something from a repository would break people's production systems, those production systems were pre-broken.
John:
Not just by the fact that they were relying on third-party code.
John:
Not just by the fact that the third-party dependencies were broken down into microscopic individual functions with ridiculous names.
John:
But because they weren't masters of their own destiny.
John:
No matter what you choose to do in terms of dependencies.
John:
You can decide based on what Marco was talking about.
John:
you know is it reliable is it suitable for my purpose am i better off doing it myself is it a core competency but like all these sorts of decisions eventually you're going to do everything you're going to do some things with third-party code whether it's your os or your compiler or whatever but especially if it's package management you have to have that stuff in-house and these days it is nothing to have a complete mirror of some public repository in your you know or just the individual packages you want check them into your version control you don't need the whole freaking repository
John:
the repository doesn't need to be involved in your build and deployment process just get the code that you need and then that code will never change out from under you if it is suitable for your purpose it will continue to be suitable until you decide that it's not um so anyway uh in summary whippersnappers wow
Casey:
I don't even know where to go from here.
Casey:
All I will say is that it's interesting that you bring up deployment because one of the things that I was thinking about when this was all going down was that when I deploy Camel to Heroku...
Casey:
What I'm deploying is just my code, including my list of dependencies.
Casey:
And just like you said, John, Heroku is then going out to NPM and fetching all of these packages on my behalf.
Casey:
So this very well could have bitten me if myself or one of the packages I depend on was dependent on the one that got pulled.
Casey:
So this is exactly something that I could have run into because
Casey:
because of the way I choose to host my site.
Casey:
And I choose to host on Heroku for a variety of reasons, but mostly, like you said, about core competencies.
Casey:
I don't have the time, interest, or desire to be a Linux server admin, and so I choose, for better or worse, to have a platform as a service.
Casey:
And that's what I like.
Casey:
Worse.
Casey:
Fine.
Casey:
But that's what I like, and that's what works for me.
Casey:
That's how I've chosen to do it.
Casey:
And yes, there are ways around this, even with Heroku, but...
Casey:
But my point is, even an innocent bystander like myself, I am potentially guilty of doing the same thing.
John:
That's weird to me that, like, that, you know, it doesn't really matter, practically speaking, that you're pulling from the Internet as you deploy.
John:
Like, wouldn't...
John:
I don't understand why that needs to be a dynamic part of the process.
John:
I feel like that should be pulled down, like the same way you pull something from CocoaPods and now it's part of your application.
John:
Every time you compile, it doesn't re-download it from CocoaPods and silently update it to a different version or you never actually have it.
John:
I know it's more dynamic and just like, oh, we're all this interconnected web and network connections never go down and I can trust what's on the other side of the network, but I don't understand how you can trust it, honestly.
John:
I mean...
John:
i don't even you know this is maybe this is another weird cpany thing but like what kind of security is there if you're if you're dynamically pulling every time you deploy you're just trusting you don't even know what the hell npm repositories heroku is using and how they might be poisoned with what i mean it doesn't matter her personal site it's not this is not a specific issue it's just the culture of it's the same culture that gives you websites that end in.io that implore you to you know run curl and pipe it through bash and
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
It's that kind of culture.
John:
It's kind of like a return to the really old days.
John:
When I was first starting Unix, like I've told the story before at BU, all TTYs were world writable.
John:
That's how naive they were.
John:
It was Telnet.
John:
There was no SSH.
John:
Your passwords were flying in plain text every time you Telneted or FTPed anywhere.
John:
All TTYs were world writable.
John:
It was like the free love 60s, right?
John:
And that era came to an end.
John:
But then, you know, fast forward 20 or 30 years, and people are...
John:
are pulling from an unknown website and piping to their shell sometimes they'd have pseudo in there it would be like someone just put in the chat room sometimes they'd be like seriously i'm gonna pull from a website and pipe to pseudo sh uh i don't know some it's a utopian world that uh has never actually really existed and uh cannot be recreated by uh wishing it were true oh my god
Casey:
I didn't realize that websites that end in .io are inherently bad.
Casey:
This is news to me.
John:
It's the whippersnappers.
John:
It is the whippersnappers.
John:
You've seen the websites I'm talking about, right?
John:
Some cool new technology, and they have a website that ends in .io, and their installation procedure wants you to just run a curl command and pipe it into a shell.
John:
i like no thanks no thank you i will not do that i mean is it any really any better when they had like you know shell archives that you download like char files and you just run those blindly maybe it wasn't that much better but i feel like you're crossing a line when the network is involved and you're just like blindly trusting bits going over a wire that you're just allowing to execute on your machine that you just pulled off a website because it's like is it the same as downloading you
John:
You know, like you can everything is Turing complete.
John:
I understand how it's all equivalent and they're not really that different.
John:
And it's like, oh, kids these days.
John:
Right.
John:
But there is a difference.
John:
There's a reason like we've moved to signed binaries and all the sorts of cryptographic things to assure us that at the very least the the application comes from the person we think it comes from and hasn't been altered.
John:
There's a reason that has rolled out on, you know, phone platforms and to a lesser extent, desktop platforms and game consoles and everything like that.
John:
And the modern practice of executing arbitrary code pulled from websites in your shell flies in the face of that progress.
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Casey:
Just today, the Safari Technology Preview was released, and we'll put the official blog post in the show notes.
Casey:
But basically, the gist is this is a separate app that you download via the web and then is updated, I guess, fortnightly via the Mac App Store.
Casey:
And it's sort of kind of a more stable version of the Safari Nightly, if I understand things right, except that it has one important feature.
Casey:
which I don't believe the Safari nightlies have or the WebKit nightlies have, which is it can talk to iCloud.
Casey:
And so if you're like me and rely on Safari and rely on Bookmark Sync and things like that, you can use the Safari technology preview.
Casey:
The reason this is a segue from what we were just talking about, though, is that I tried this on my work computer.
Casey:
I haven't put it on my personal one yet.
Casey:
And I immediately went to install the one password extension.
Casey:
When I did so, I attempted to enter a password for whatever it was I was looking at at the time.
Casey:
And the one password extension said, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Casey:
This isn't signed the way we expect.
Casey:
Thus, this is dangerous.
Casey:
Thus, we don't want you to do this.
Casey:
And that comes back to what you were saying a minute ago, John, about cryptographically signing things, making sure...
Casey:
that what you're looking at is what you expect, et cetera.
Casey:
So I just thought that was interesting and good on 1Password for telling me these things, although I couldn't figure out a way to override it, which is a little bit of a bummer.
Casey:
But it still worked really well outside of the 1Password issue.
Casey:
The technology preview worked well.
Casey:
Everything seemed fine to me.
Casey:
I haven't had the chance to kick the tires too much yet, but so far so good.
Casey:
I've really liked it.
Casey:
Have you guys played with this at all?
Marco:
I only have one question.
Marco:
Did all of your plug-in icons all kind of shift over to the right side as you were using it, or did they stay where you put them on the left side of the address bar?
John:
Oh, that freaking address bar, even in non-preview Safari, even just in regular Safari, frequently the icons in the toolbar of Safari decide they don't like where they are and would like a new home.
Marco:
and then i put them back they all just they they end up just all because i think what happens is if they get updated i think they lose their spot and they get and they always get added on to the right side so i like a balanced bar so i i have four of these buttons that go in the address bar from extensions i like to put two on the left two on the right and it they always end up just having all four on the right after you know within a few weeks
John:
yeah it's not good about remembering where you put things in the grand tradition of the modern apple they will let you rearrange things sometimes but they will not respect your rearrangement the only place i can say that isn't true is to the credit of ios springboard is usually pretty good about not moving your crap not 100 because every once in a while something will bump out of place like if you do an os update and it adds an unmovable undeletable apple app and will bump you things around or whatever but
John:
it's pretty good but anyway safari toolbars yes yeah um i have experienced that like i said i experienced that not in the beta not in the nightly but just in the regular stable one not even during updates and i usually blame like weird icloud syncing like it gets it loses track of things and it's trying to notice that i added an icon somewhere six years ago on a mac that's no longer in service but there's some state on some server somewhere inside apple that wakes up once every three months and spews a bunch of xml towards or property lists towards my various macs and perturbs the icons but
John:
how am i supposed to pin cute dogs to pinterest if i can't find the pinterest button in safari that's a problem uh buying them to key shortcuts uh but the most important feature of safari technology preview still unmentioned what is the most important feature oh the uh copy the clipboard thing so you can get rid of flash no it's got a purple icon come on this is the whole reason anyone would ever why would i want to why would i want to use this well it's purple
John:
purple is better than blue uh and definitely better than nightly which is gray uh yeah no actually that's the purple icon is actually you know i do like it i do like it better and it does look neat and it's a reason you might want to try it but it's it highlights the one disappointing thing for me about it i would have preferred the chrome system where you can just sort of tell chrome go on the beta channel or whatever um you only have one installation of chrome and you just say uh but chrome update yourself from the beta channel instead of the regular channel
John:
uh and the reason is safari is still my default browser and i realize that i'm pretty much never going to use the safari technology preview unless i sort of uh disable or make inert the standard one so that the the preview can sort of take over as my default browser but i don't really want to do that either like i would i prefer to just have one safari and switch it back and forth from should i be pulling updates from the beta thing or not but
John:
Um, this is certainly better than it was before because I never really ran the nightlies for the reasons that Casey covered that, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't signed by Apple, so you couldn't have the, the iCloud connection and everything.
John:
So this is a step up, but I don't really want to run two copies of Safari and I don't want to have to zip up the old one.
John:
And I'm not entirely confident that even if I tell the OS that my default browser is this one, that the other one isn't going to launch on its own.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Maybe I should give it a chance.
John:
Maybe we should try using the purple one for a while and see if the blue one comes back to life zombie-like unless I zip it.
John:
Um,
John:
but anyway lots of good new tech in like casey mentioned in the new one a bunch of shadow dom stuff ecma strips ecma script 6 which is a slightly less crappy version of javascript so much hate yeah the copy and paste uh not paste sorry the cut and copy commands which is great and i love that they highlight you know this is the only reason anyone still has legit reason to run flash because it's the only way to get stuff onto the clipboard
John:
We do it at work because sometimes you just want to have a link that you click that copies something into the clipboard.
John:
And having to run Flash for that has always felt gross.
John:
So another browser supporting it natively is good.
John:
But anyway, purple icon.
John:
Thumbs up.
Casey:
Another interesting thing here.
Casey:
I'm going to read you the entire cut and copy portion because it's very short.
Casey:
So, yes, I love the dig on Flash.
Casey:
But when I tweeted about this earlier, a handful of people were like, oh, God, people are just going to start pasting things in on me or they're just going to start copying what's in my clipboard.
Casey:
What is this going to mean for 1Password?
Casey:
And a few people were getting very upset.
Casey:
And I think it's important to note, one, that this is read only or excuse me, write only.
Casey:
Two, it's in response to a user gesture.
Casey:
And three, I'm very curious to hear what that gesture is.
Casey:
Is it that it can only be on like a click handler or something like that?
Casey:
Is it something more explicit?
Casey:
I'm not sure.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I think this is a really good thing.
John:
and it's already support i think chrome already supports it like other modern browsers have have ways to get things onto the clipboard without flash right so it's not safari is not the first one to implement this feature and yeah the security it's useless for even in response to a gesture like everything can be used to exploit eventually you know with some sort of buffer overflow or whatever but they can't pull the websites cannot get it what's in your clipboard all they can do is take their crap and put it there
John:
which could still be annoying like those stupid things you know when you try to copy and paste text and they put the little attribution line next to it like we've all seen that one that it can still be annoying to put stuff into your clipboard but annoying websites are always going to be annoying no matter what and so if the website does that you just won't go back to it or we'll just deal with the annoyance but they can't you know if you copy sensitive information and go to a website this feature does not allow the website to get at that information in any way
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
This is a good thing.
Casey:
And it's another example of a slightly more transparent Apple, which I approve of.
Casey:
I'm really pleased with the way 2015, 2016 have been with Apple being more transparent with Swift, with this.
Casey:
This is all good stuff and they should be commended for it.
John:
Remember when we talked about Safari as the new IE kind of stuff?
John:
Not that this is a direct reaction to that, but this specifically addresses a lot of the actual issues raised in that.
John:
Like, oh, why isn't Apple doing more on Shadow DOM or whatever?
John:
The idea that they just had the nightlies and it was an opaque development process and you had to wait for the next version of the OS to come out to get the thing.
John:
Now this is an incremental step towards...
John:
Even if you're not a developer and you're just a regular user and you want to get features earlier, here's a more convenient way to do it.
John:
Even more convenient than the nightlies that we've been building for you for a year.
John:
And here's us talking about on our blog.
John:
This is not the first blog post.
John:
The WebKit blog has been updated frequently to talk about the new features they're planning on adding and just been much more open about.
John:
stuff that we previously would have had to wait for wwdc to sort of read the tea leaves of the webkit work or you know because you couldn't even see all the webkit work because apple would do stuff internally and they wouldn't commit to the public repository until like they were ready to release and they're just being much more open about that process including talking about future products to say we're adding this that and that and they're going to be coming in a future release which is you know like they've been doing the swift is
John:
unheard of from the old apple sort of talking about future features for products granted obscure techie nerd type products right you know that only web developers or gooey application developers really care about but still it you know trusting that people are going to understand oh well you promise this feature whatever like
John:
If you see the whole development process going out in the open, you'll understand when things get booted out.
John:
When, oh, this didn't make it in time for Swift 3.
John:
When inevitably some proposal doesn't make it in time for Swift 3, even though they talked about wanting to put it in there, no one will be mad because anyone involved in the process would have seen every step of the way why that thing didn't make it into the process.
John:
What else were you doing during that time?
John:
When everyone can see the process, it's so much more understandable.
John:
It's like, oh, well, that didn't make it into Swift 3.
John:
We're kicking it down the road.
John:
Um, it doesn't seem like some sinister plan to withhold technology goodies from you.
John:
It just seems like the fallout of software development, which has also unexpected things.
John:
And when you've seen all those things happen in front of you, who, who can, I mean, I'm sure someone will still find a way to be mad, but very few sane people will be mad about it.
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Casey:
So Intel has ended TikTok.
Casey:
And I don't really know what to say about this other than I think it's pretty expected.
Casey:
So, John, what are your thoughts?
John:
I'm just kind of sad that I finally nailed down which one was the tick and which one was the talk, and then go and change the process.
John:
All the hard work I put in, I studied and studied.
Casey:
So which one is the tick and which one is the talk?
Casey:
Shrink is the tick.
John:
Okay.
John:
But it's not that it matters anymore.
John:
Now they have much more sensible names.
John:
So they had to come up with another, I don't know, catchphrase or whatever, marketing term for their new strategy.
John:
Thunk?
John:
So instead of TikTok or TikTok Thunk, they came up with, it's not great.
John:
TikTok was much better.
John:
So that team did a better job than this team and come up with the acronym.
John:
But this was PAO, and that stands for Process Architecture and Optimization.
John:
and so which one is the shrink it's the one that's called process like it's much easier now they made that part of it easier but pao does not roll off the tongue like tick tock does uh so it's basically you know process is the tick architecture is the talk that's when they they produce a new micro architecture a new chip that has a you know a different number of execution units and different branch prediction and different cash size and you know like it's a new architecture
John:
And then they're adding a new third phase called optimization, which, as far as I'm aware, I'm looking at older articles here.
John:
We'll link in the show notes from Nantech.
John:
As far as I'm aware, they haven't really nailed down what's going to happen in the optimization phase beyond saying, well, it's not going to be a shrink and it's not going to be a new architecture.
John:
It's going to be this third time when we do other things.
John:
What can they do in optimization?
John:
They can make the integrated GPU better.
John:
They could, you know...
John:
Maybe make it use less power through more clever, you know, power management or throttling or thermals or, you know, I don't know what they're going to do.
John:
The optimization phase, we'll find out, but it's going to be a formal, a formal part of the process.
John:
And as many people in the chat room are snarkily trying to imply like tick tock.
John:
May have been the strategy in name for the past year or two, but the sort of the length of the tick and the length of the talks have been stretching out in weird ways.
John:
And really, this three phase architecture is just more of an acknowledgement of what was sort of happening already.
John:
The timescales are stretched out more.
John:
And that Intel wants to recognize that and set expectations to say we are going to do a new process and then we're going to do a new architecture.
John:
And then we're going to sort of work on the two of them together for a little while longer to give the next process a longer time to hopefully arrive on our new three phase schedule.
John:
So we're all sort of still staring at sort of the oncoming train of the the end of Moore's law.
John:
Uh, the real end is, is very far out in the distance, theoretically speaking, but practically speaking, there need to be, it's getting harder and harder to make things smaller and smaller, uh, with lithography techniques.
John:
Um, and the research and the money required to go down to the next smaller size is like, you know, the real next breakthrough has to be like, do we have to continue to use lithography, you know, sort of shining, uh,
John:
Not so much light or, you know, shining forms of electromagnetic radiation onto a thing to cause the areas exposed to react differently than the non-exposed areas.
John:
That's what we've been doing for our entire lives to make integrated circuits.
John:
I don't know what's next, assembling transistors out of individual atoms or weird technologies that, you know, in the, you know, sort of the R&D realm.
John:
You can definitely make things smaller that way, but you can't make them at scale.
John:
And so there's this sort of general research gap.
John:
But...
John:
Anyway, Intel plows bravely forward and the last show we talked a lot about Intel missing their dates and holding up Apple's things or whatever, but the bottom line is they're still ahead of all their competition in terms of their process, how far along they are at different process sizes.
John:
And that continues to be an advantage for them.
John:
Yeah.
John:
and maybe they'll be the ones to make the next step before everybody else because they're putting in the time and energy and they're already ahead of everybody else so uh you can't really be picking on intel too much because they are sort of at the bleeding edge of this but if there is a wall out in the future intel may just get to it first and then everyone catches up with them and then intel's advantage is is gone um so stay tuned for uh the atp episode in 15 years when we revisit that topic
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
I can only hope.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So speaking of Intel kind of falling on its face and speaking of really crummy and loose segues, the Oculus founder said that the Oculus Rift, which was shipped in the last day or two, right?
Casey:
Anyway, the Rift will come to the Mac only if Apple, quote, ever releases a good computer, quote.
Casey:
Maybe that's all Intel's fault.
Casey:
So, what's going on here?
Casey:
By what metric is Apple not releasing a good computer?
Marco:
I mean, I hit on this a little bit last week.
Marco:
I mean, the main thing is that the Oculus requires a pretty intense graphics card.
Marco:
And over time, you know, more pedestrian ones will probably be able to drive it just fine.
Marco:
But right now, it's so cutting edge and it has such high...
Marco:
graphical needs that it requires a really, really high-powered graphics card.
Marco:
There's only a handful in the PC world that are good enough to do it, and Apple ships none of those in any of their computers.
Marco:
The only computer that could even come close would maybe be the Mac Pro, but the current Mac Pro is two and a half years old or so, and has fairly outdated GPUs as a result of being so old.
Marco:
I think we covered this a little bit last week, so I don't want to go too far into it now, but I think the short version is that there's a few problems here, most of which Apple doesn't appear to care about.
Marco:
As I'm sure John will discuss in a second, I don't think Apple cares that much about games on the Mac, but Apple has...
Marco:
so far, for a long time now, tied their updates to Intel's updates.
Marco:
And as we discussed, as Intel's cycles have been getting longer between major updates to their CPUs, that has also stretched out Mac update cycles.
Marco:
And Apple's habit, as discussed last week, of skipping some processor generations that Intel gives them for their lower-volume products, like the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro, and even some of the laptops these days,
Marco:
Their strategy, Apple's strategy for skipping some of the things that they could use, kind of like holding off till better ones come later, that's also working against them because, again, as the Intel generations have gotten longer, we now have a situation that we have today with most of the laptops where we're sitting around waiting for the Skylake revision from Intel to come out in quantity so that Apple can ship the new MacBook Pros.
Marco:
And meanwhile, the ones you buy today have something like a three-year-old CPU in them.
Marco:
So something here has to change, you know, either.
Marco:
Well, I hope I hope something has to change.
Marco:
We'll see if it actually does or not based on Apple's actions.
Marco:
But obviously, Intel can't deliver new generations of chips any faster.
Marco:
We're seeing that, you know, we're seeing that they are slowing down and their rate of being able to deliver these things because just everything's getting harder.
Marco:
Apple needs to either be okay not getting these markets and be okay selling three-year-old hardware in Macs, brand new today, on a regular basis.
Marco:
Or Apple has to stop skipping Intel generations, which would generally cut their product cycle time in half because they tend to skip every other generation on some of these products like the Mac Pro.
Marco:
Or Apple can start issuing updates to products even when there is no new CPU to use from Intel, which they have occasionally done, but it's not a routine thing for them.
Marco:
Any of those things could solve this problem.
Marco:
Also, then you have the issue of even if they kept their products more up to date, what products does Apple sell that could accommodate the size and thermals of a high-power GPU?
Marco:
And it's basically like one and a half.
Marco:
It's like the Mac Pro for sure, and then maybe the big iMac, depending on the cooling requirements and everything.
Marco:
You basically have two Macs that Apple could plausibly put really high-power GPUs in, and both of those are probably pretty low-volume products for them, especially the Mac Pro.
Marco:
So it just seems like Apple doesn't really care to address this market, which I think is unfortunate because I wish Apple had a little bit more hunger in attracting people from PCs than they seem to, with the exception of the whole iPad stuff, but that's a whole different thing.
Marco:
But I do wish they would solve this more often because I think it would make Macs better also.
Marco:
And if Apple ever has VR ambitions, this will hurt them as well.
Marco:
But for now, this is the situation we're in, and we'll see if any of those factors change.
John:
yeah apple's apple's attitude towards these things has been frustrating like a couple years ago i wrote something on my blog asking for the cheese grater that hadn't been updated in forever back when the show just started that was one of the reasons our icons was was the old cheese grater with the the sarcastic new label on it because they introduced a new mac pro that was barely new and it's like are you ever going to update this what's the deal and i was asking for them to
John:
You know, is there anyone left at Apple who really cares about high-performance computers?
John:
No, they're not going to make a lot of money for you.
John:
No, they're not going to be high volume.
John:
You know, it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.
John:
But if you are computer enthusiasts, isn't there someone there who, like, really likes...
John:
fast, great computers, just like the example I use for Halo cars in the car industry, where lots of car companies make a car that's probably going to be a money loser for them, just because car companies are filled with people who love cars, and people who love cars tend to love fast cars and beautiful cars, and so they make these cars that are just, you know, you might look at them as a boondoggle, like...
John:
You spend all this money on R&D.
John:
It's got all these custom parts.
John:
No one's even going to use this thing.
John:
And it's weird and finicky or whatever.
John:
But you make it because you love cars, right?
John:
And they did that.
John:
The two Mac Pro, I mean, you may not agree with their vision, but you can't say that they just kind of punted it and just like, oh, here's another tower computer.
John:
they had the vision of this crazy tube-shaped computer like that this was the origin of high performance computing and it you know it had these at the time fairly powerful video cards with 12 gigs of v-ram which was unprecedented shipping stock on a mac and it was you know like it was it was interesting and innovative on all fronts was it a good supercar was it a good halo car well maybe not or whatever um but then you can't go and then just let that sit there
John:
like man and then you just lose interest right because that's sort of like on again off again thing where it's like we love high performance here's an amazingly expandable mac that looks like a cheese grater and it's easy to open up and you can swap the ram and we'll update it frequently and well you know you can put in different video cards and it has slots and look how easy it is taking in and out the drives and the first one can only do two drives now this one can do four and it's even easier to get the drives in and out and
John:
You know, they made a water-cooled one.
John:
Like, it seemed like they were on that bandwagon for a pretty long time, and then they lost interest.
John:
And then they came back and were interested, and then they said immediately lost interest again.
John:
And that's not a way to attract people who have similar sensibilities.
John:
Like, hey, are you one of the people who's like, you know, a gearhead who loves, you know, supercars and high-performance cars?
John:
Do you like big, high-performance computers?
John:
Yeah.
John:
in some respects as an end in and of themselves like you don't even need this but you just think it's cool the same reason people buy fast cars that they can never drive at the full speed that they're going to drive you know it's like if you're that type of does apple care about the customer sometimes they do some because there are people inside apple who are like that but then all of a sudden they don't again and it becomes hard to trust the company and so many people so many things i've you know been reading lately about
John:
pros who you know maybe these people who actually have legit need like professional graphics people or professional 3d people professional video people or whatever saying that sometimes apple it pays attention to them but then they don't and they're kind of tired of the the the relay the rocky relationship and they're going to somewhere that has more consistently supported them and they're switching to pcs or whatever gamers
John:
have long since made that decision is like apple has never really cared about gamers and only incidentally when they shipped machines where it was easy to swap video cards could you buy a pc video card flash it for your mac shove it in there and then boom you've got a mac that is actually a really good gaming pc as well
John:
um that's part of palmer lucky's complaint here the quote i put in the notes about this is you can you can buy a six thousand dollar mac pro with top of the line amd fire pro d700 and it still doesn't match our recommended specs like it doesn't even meet like here's sort of like that here's what we think you should have for the rift a six thousand dollar mac pro doesn't meet it meet it like
John:
maybe uh you know when that six thousand dollar mac pro was introduced it would have been a reasonable thing like if oculus had come out then their their minimum spec may have been lower like you know lower resolution or whatever lower target frame rate whatever the things are but nowadays it's the same computer it's still six thousand dollars and it's still got the d700 in it and the world has just moved on by leaps and bounds even when it was introduced in this case the d700 was not a gaming focused card so even when it was introduced there were gaming cards that were way faster right
John:
But now it's just ridiculous.
John:
But the price hasn't gone down, right?
John:
The whole Apple thing of like, we will continue to sell the same computer for the same price for three years while the rest of the world moves on, which you can get away with in some markets.
John:
But if you're going to do anything in sort of the high-end, pro, super powerful or whatever, like I just wish the Mac Pro, whether it pays attention to gaming at all, I just wish the Mac Pro would be the best, fastest computer in the world at something for any sustained period of time.
John:
because i feel like that is entirely possible fine make it the best computer for running that weird you know painting you know 12 megapixel textures in real time onto models things they demoed at wwc for pixar and everything make it the best computer in the world for that for more than 15 minutes like it doesn't even have to be games but i think it should be something and it just it's sad that they've been neglected like that and it's sad that in this case apple is completely missing out as far as we can see on the outside on the entirety of vr which
John:
who knows i really hope apple has all sorts of vr projects internally and they decided it's not ready or not interesting or the form it's taking on pcs they're not interested or whatever um but they're they're not allowing people who buy their even their highest-end computers to participate in it even speculatively so it's kind of it's kind of depressing and the final point is with the whole palmer lucky slamming the max i think he's slamming with reason but it doesn't mean that you need
John:
an amazingly powerful graphics card to do quote unquote vr you need it for the oculus rift which is a particular vr product but as we talked about earlier if you have a playstation 4 you can get playstation vr for a couple hundred bucks extra it's not going to be as good as the rift it's not going to be as powerful but it will run on your playstation 4 which is nowhere near as powerful as the recommended system for the oculus rift so vr does not equal oculus rift they're two different things there's a specific product and vr is a concept hell they have ones you can use on your cell phone now
John:
obviously the rift is probably going to be the highest end one or whatever but you don't have to entirely miss out in vr because you don't have a fancy high-end gaming pc you'll if you're interested in it as as at least uh marco and i both are we'll try it out on a couple hundred bucks thing we buy on our playstation and uh it'll probably be weird and
John:
and it's gonna it's the very first consumer release of this technology so inevitably 10 years from now we'll look back on this vr and think either it's ridiculous that we even considered vr to be a thing or look back at it and look at how incredibly primitive it is compared to what comes after it so uh we'll link to that uh piece in polygon to basically saying your mac is fine for vr just not for the rift um which again it's high end versus capability like i i want some mac somewhere to be the best computer in the world for some demanding uh
Marco:
computational function because i'm into fast computers that's why like i don't feel like i need any way to justify like that and i wish there were more people in apple that had the same attitude yeah and it isn't just about gaming or vr you know like even even if vr doesn't take off or even if even if you can if you can disregard gamers as a market apple cares about lots of apple software or software that apple customers would have run can make use of the extra resources of a well-equipped mac pro
Marco:
You know, the Mac Pro is the only computer in the Mac lineup that can have more than four cores.
Marco:
And as discussed previously, much to John's chagrin, I run a utility in my menu bar called iStatMenus.
Marco:
Me too.
Marco:
That uses up all those cores.
Marco:
It shows me when my cores are in use and by what.
Marco:
I've noticed over the last few years, even though making software multi-threaded is difficult and not everything can effectively take advantage of multiple cores, I have noticed in recent years that a lot more of the things that I do are taking advantage of multiple cores.
Marco:
And there's lots of – and even stuff that a lot of people would use like Apple's Photos app, for instance, or any kind of heavy photo workflow, Lightroom, Photos app, Aperture.
Marco:
If you do any kind of video stuff, of course, that'll use it too.
Marco:
Lots of software that a lot of people use.
Marco:
can take advantage of any amount of cores you give it within reason.
Marco:
So right now, the iMacs and the 15-inch MacBook Pros have four cores.
Marco:
I would love to have an 8 or 12-core Mac Pro.
Marco:
That would be amazing.
Marco:
But right now, they're not that competitive because there's no reason to buy one right now with the prices and the age of them and everything.
Marco:
But there's so much...
Marco:
software now so many common needs that lots of apple customers do have that could take advantage of this you don't have to just be a video editor or a high-end gamer to want a mac pro you know and i can i can complain at length about the the trade-offs made by the new tube mac pro compared to the old cheese grater it is overall a good product if it was updated on a regular basis but you know the old cheese grater i think was was a better one honestly in in many ways um but
Marco:
I at least want something, some sign that somebody at Apple both A, cares about the Mac, which is... I know a lot of the executives do care about the Mac, but sometimes it's hard to see the actions of that on the outside.
Marco:
And B, that somebody high up at Apple cares about high-end pro use of the Mac.
Marco:
And that is the part that's been seemingly fading in recent years, and I worry about that.
Marco:
You know, it's one thing to exit the software game, you know, to discontinue aperture.
Marco:
Final Cut, I think they're still okay on.
Marco:
I don't know much about the video world, but I think they are maintaining that okay.
Marco:
Logic, they're maintaining okay.
Marco:
You know, even if Apple starts slacking off on the software side of addressing the pro market...
Marco:
It worries me greatly when they start ignoring the hardware side.
Marco:
Because the software side, we have good alternatives.
Marco:
If Aperture went away, well, we have Lightroom.
Marco:
And we have the new Photos app.
Marco:
If Final Cut goes away, there's Avid and other things people use.
Marco:
If Logic goes away, there's other audio editors.
Marco:
But if there's no more high-end Mac hardware...
Marco:
You have to abandon the entire Mac platform to have an alternative to that, which is a really high bar.
Marco:
And it's a really big ask.
Marco:
And a lot of people like me don't want to do it.
Marco:
I don't want to abandon the Mac.
Marco:
I don't want to build a Hackintosh or switch to Linux or Windows.
Marco:
I want to keep using Mac OS.
Marco:
And Mac OS was designed incredibly well and incredibly well architected to take advantage of incredibly high-end hardware that Apple just doesn't really sell anymore.
Marco:
And that's kind of sad.
John:
Well, the OpenGL stack is not great, but aside from that, yeah.
Casey:
I think you make a decent point, Marco, but I also don't think we should be throwing in the towel quite yet.
Casey:
I mean, I would agree that they don't update things like the Mac Pro as frequently as anyone in the world but me would want.
Casey:
I'm perfectly happy with them not updating it, but every 10 years, so I don't have to go through another one of those months of this show when that's all we talked about.
Casey:
But in all seriousness, I don't think that
Casey:
That we should be too disgruntled or sad that we haven't seen one in admittedly a fair bit of time because presumably this will get fixed and it will get fixed soon enough.
Casey:
And I don't blame you for being grumbly about the pace with which they're fixing.
Casey:
They're refreshing the Mac Pro, but it's got to be coming.
Casey:
I mean, it has to be and presumably soon.
Casey:
I hope so.
John:
That sounds like exactly what we were saying when the cheese grater was over.
John:
Like, well, but they've got updated eventually.
John:
And then eventually we enter the second phase, which is like, maybe they're never going to update again.
John:
Maybe they're just going to stop selling Mac pros.
John:
Like that was the headspace we were in around about the time that the tube appeared was we were seriously considering.
John:
Well, you know, Apple really has a consumer focus lately, and they're all about the iPhone and the iPad.
John:
And, you know, do they really need the Mac Pro in their lineup?
John:
Not really.
John:
Maybe they feel like they can get away.
John:
Like, maybe they just won't make any more Mac Pros.
John:
And then they came up with the Tube.
John:
And like I said, you can argue about whether the Tube is the correct vision for...
John:
high performance computing but you can't say they skimped you can't say they just gave you a watered down iMac in a tube shape like that thing was a Mac Pro through and through with their vision of you know a whole bunch of ports on the back of the thing and circular and two huge video not one huge GPU but two huge GPUs in one of them you know and their technology for using them for compute is also using to drive the graphics and the enclosure and like it's not the same vision as the cheese grater but it is a high performance vision and it was exciting to see
John:
I think that was actually the Schiller can't innovate my ass thing, right?
John:
Yep.
Casey:
Can't innovate anymore my ass.
John:
That was legit.
John:
You could be crowing about that.
John:
And again, you could just disagree about their vision of the product, but you can't say that they were skimping and were afraid and were just kind of like dipping their toe into high-performance computers.
John:
They wanted to make the future of high-performance computers, but it's just been so painful to see that thing land and then just nothing for so long, especially since when that landed, as we discussed much on the show, what Marco and I wanted was
John:
uh what was i calling it back then the uh the quad 27 inch display right yeah and we knew this thing couldn't couldn't drive it right and it was like well but this is the first one you know it can't drive it maybe you could drive it no it can't quite drive it or whatever but you know it's not the white the one that we want but okay maybe the tech's not ready for it but surely the next one will do we didn't think the next one was going to come three years later you know we thought yeah and in the meantime we both got 5k imax well
John:
my wife did anyway um so we've got our display but it's not in a mac pro and the current mac pro still can't drive it and we assume the next one will be able to drive it but we don't know when that one's coming and even that's a question mark honestly like whether whether the next mac pro will be able to drive a 5k display is is honestly still a question mark
Marco:
But to me, I've complained in the past about the drive-by software updates that lower priority things seem to get these drive-by updates where they'll get attention for an hour.
Marco:
You'll have one engineer working on something for a week and then never allowed to touch it again.
Marco:
That's when you get something like the LCAP 10 disk utility.
Marco:
It seems like the Mac Pro, from what we know so far, and maybe Apple's about to prove us all wrong on this.
Marco:
I hope they are.
Marco:
But from what we know so far, it seems like the Mac Pro update to the tube was a drive-by hardware update where they were ignoring it seemingly for a long time.
Marco:
And then they had this great update that, again, I can complain a lot about what they did to it because I think they made...
Marco:
I think they made it a lot more narrow and a lot more expensive than what it was before.
Marco:
They really narrowed the appeal and they eliminated a lot of totally valid use cases.
Marco:
But they did innovate.
Marco:
As Phil Schiller's ass said, they did innovate.
Marco:
But they innovated, and then they just kind of dropped the ball after that.
Marco:
There are new CPUs for that they could have used in the meantime, and they skipped a generation.
Marco:
They could have upgraded the GPUs.
Marco:
Yeah, they could have upgraded just the GPUs.
Marco:
If they're so focused...
Marco:
On this machine, having these two workstation GPUs that somebody like me who would want to buy the machine doesn't need at all.
Marco:
I would gladly buy it with one consumer GPU because I'm buying it for the CPU power and the RAM ceiling and everything else, not the GPU reasons.
Marco:
If they're going to refocus the entire machine on this high-end dual GPU use, then follow through on that.
Marco:
And they didn't follow through.
Marco:
The GPUs are sitting there stale forever.
Marco:
I've heard from people who try to use OpenCL for things that it's really kind of had the ball dropped on it as well.
Marco:
It just seems like they came in and they did this huge redesign and refocus of this product that we weren't really asking for and then didn't follow through even on that.
Marco:
So that's why I'm so sad for this product because I love the Mac Pro.
Marco:
I love, especially what it used to be, I love having this extremely flexible, expandable tower that had two CPU sockets, tons of RAM slots.
Marco:
You could put a whole bunch of drives in it.
Marco:
And granted, you can modernize it in other ways.
Marco:
These days, you don't maybe need as many drives anymore because now we're in the era of SSDs and the drives have gotten so big, you don't need as many anymore.
Marco:
So you can see them removing some of these things.
Marco:
I do still greatly miss dual socket configurations, and I do greatly miss configurations that don't have two graphics cards because I don't need them.
Marco:
But I hope they write this at some point soon.
Marco:
I don't know if they will or not, but I really hope they do.
Marco:
And I'm still maintaining some optimism because if they don't, the iMac 5K is a great product.
Marco:
I'm using mine.
Marco:
I'm almost always very happy with it.
Marco:
I would like a lot more CPU power.
Marco:
So if they make a compelling Mac Pro that I can get eight cores in reasonably, I would love that.
Marco:
But if the Mac Pro withers away in irrelevance the way it has been over the last few years, and if it's never good again, I still have the iMac.
Marco:
And that's fine, but boy, I wish I could have the Mac Pro back.
Marco:
Just because of CPU speed?
Marco:
Mostly because of CPU speed.
John:
And fan quietness.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
Things like being totally silent at any load level is just kind of more graceful and nice.
Marco:
Having the Xeon class components and the ECC RAM and everything, I feel like it makes things...
Marco:
slightly more reliable having more internal ports stuff like that you know like you know like more usb ports like built in rather than having to use flaky hubs stuff like that like i i i love all those things about the mac pro in many ways i miss it uh and again if if we never get it back the way me or john want it we'll deal we'll be okay
Marco:
But it does seem like a waste that there's all these amazing CPUs out there at the high-end world.
Marco:
Like in the next generation, the Broadbell Xeons, there's a 5 gigahertz part with four cores.
Marco:
If you could have a dual socket configuration, have two of those.
Marco:
eight cores at five gigahertz that would be incredible that would be the best single threaded and multi-threaded mac and but they're not going to offer that because the current mac pro design is only one socket and the cpus they use can do two can do two they just don't offer that machine and it's just like
Marco:
There's so much more they could offer.
Marco:
There are so many great processors in the Xeon line they could offer.
Marco:
And there are so many use cases the old Mac Pro solved that the new one doesn't.
Marco:
And all those things make me sad.
Marco:
But I'm still hoping for a Mac Pro update soon.
Marco:
We'll see what happens, I guess.
Marco:
Have faith.
Marco:
It'll happen.
Marco:
Hope so.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks to our three sponsors this week, Casper, Warby Parker, and audible.com.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him 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-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S
Casey:
so you added a family member i did yes it has it has wheels though you subtracted one too yes may the m5 rest in peace i'll miss that car
Marco:
I'll tell you what, when I was preparing to drop it off and when I did drop it off, I was almost in tears.
Marco:
This is the only time that I've ever given up a car that I owned where I was really sad to see it go.
Marco:
Every other time that I've either stopped having a car or upgraded to a different car, every other time I've been kind of ambivalent toward my old one for some reason.
Marco:
Before I was leasing, it either cost me a lot of money because it was breaking down constantly and that's why I was getting a different car.
Marco:
Or with my previous 3 Series lease...
Marco:
I knew I was upgrading to the M5.
Marco:
So going from a 3 Series to an M5 was a huge jump.
Marco:
And I was like, oh man, I'm so excited.
Marco:
This 3 Series, yeah, it'll be fine.
Marco:
I'm going on the M5.
Marco:
Forget the 3 Series.
Marco:
This time, the M5, it's so good.
Marco:
And it's so different from where I was going that I was almost regretting it.
Marco:
I was almost second-guessing my move when I was training.
Marco:
I'm like, man, am I going to really regret this?
Marco:
Because where I'm going is different.
Marco:
It's not all better.
Marco:
It's better in some ways, worse than others.
Marco:
And that M5 just is such a good car that I was really very sad to leave it.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm sad that you left it behind.
Casey:
I mean, I don't blame you.
Casey:
It's not like you did anything wrong, but I'm sad about it because, you know, I feel like I bonded with that car.
Casey:
I mean, it's the only car I've ever driven.
Casey:
It's the only car I've ever driven in two countries.
Casey:
It's the only car that's ever shuffled me around Germany.
Casey:
It's the only car I've ever been in or driven the Nürburgring on, in, whatever.
Casey:
We, as a group of four, spent a lot of good times in that car, and you guys, as a group of two and three, spent a lot of good times in that car.
Yeah.
Casey:
It's sad, but that's okay because you have bought yourself a Tesla.
John:
Well, I have leased myself a Tesla.
John:
They still own it.
John:
Well, that was the problem.
John:
You leased the M5 too.
John:
It was never really yours.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
I know you felt like it was yours, but you were just leasing it.
John:
So you were never willing to commit to the M5.
John:
You're always like, for three years, I'll give you a trial period M5.
John:
Maybe I'll like you.
John:
Maybe I won't.
John:
But you're probably going back.
Marco:
Believe me, you don't want to own an M car older than three years.
John:
I mean, it depends.
John:
The thing I'll miss most about the M car is just what we just talked about about the Mac Pro.
John:
I mean, maybe it's partly where I live, but Tesla's like the Toyota Camry of where I live.
John:
They're all over the place.
John:
But I rarely see an M5.
John:
I think there's like two in the whole extended neighborhood area, but there's like a Tesla on every other driveway.
John:
So the Tesla just seems...
John:
less special because it's less rare it's also less of a less of a mac pro in terms of we we make lots of good cars and they're plenty fast but can we take one of our cars and make it you know as good and as fast as we possibly can and i don't even care what kind of car it is even if it's a big giant four-door sedan we can make that go fast too let's let's work our magic like it's the you know it's the
John:
almost pointlessly exotic high-end right and the tesla especially since you didn't get the pointlessly exotic high-end tesla but even if you had it's still more it's got other goals because it is a whole new platform a whole new technology and it is necessarily more prosaic we are not at the at the stage yet where there can even be an electric car that is a regular street car that is as focused on ridiculously excessive performance applied to another car as
John:
The most ridiculous AMG Mercedes or the M5s or any sort of supercar type of thing.
John:
So I feel like you are taking a step up in practicality and a step down in ridiculous automotive excess.
Marco:
okay well first of all i think i i think i disagree with two two big things that you just said number one i would say the model s in its various like supercar configurations which i didn't get as you said um like the the p configurations and then the one with ludicrous mode i would say those maybe are those kind of extreme configurations and also i have never seen as many other m5s in one neighborhood as i have when i visited your neighborhood
John:
there's a lot there's a lot of fives and there are a couple of m5s but the teslas are everywhere they are just like seriously it is the toyota camry of my neighborhood like when i commute all i just see is teslas before the tesla as i've pointed out uh much to uh casey's upsetness the panamera was the other thing that like before tesla came on the scene oh god
John:
panameras were everywhere and i was like who's buying these cars they were everywhere we're only talking about happy thoughts this time john no panamera discussion but it's the same but it's the same type of thing that the tesla and the panamera are both like four-door cars but shaped trying to be shaped like sporty cars like you know how the tesla it doesn't look like an m5 it is definitely more kind of like i'm a sporty car and
John:
but i have four doors how can we sort of make that look nice and tesla does obviously a better job than the panamera does of it but they're both doing that type of thing and it's and it's kind of i feel like both of them are very similar to marco like midlife crisis cars where you know that's why marco's car is red right
John:
They were where they don't want to feel like they have to get a four door car, but they do have to get a four door car.
John:
So they go to the Porsche dealership to get a four door car.
John:
And then modern version of that is I have to get a four door car because I have a family.
John:
But can I get this super fast electric one that I still feel and get it in red?
John:
And now I still feel like, you know, got a cool car.
Casey:
A couple of things real quick.
Casey:
Number one, the Tesla is light years better looking than the Panamera.
Casey:
The Panamera is just hideously ugly.
Casey:
Number two.
Casey:
So I was grabbing the Panamera link for the show notes as we were recording and I landed on the Panamera model page, which I'll put in the chat room.
Casey:
There are one, two, three, four, one, two, three.
Casey:
There are like, what is this?
Casey:
14 different models of Panamera that run from $78,100 to $263,900 for the Panamera exclusive series.
Casey:
Why would you want that?
Casey:
Who in the name of God would pay a quarter of a million dollars for a Panamera?
John:
You haven't shopped for a Porsche recently.
John:
Porsche measures their option packages in units of Hondas.
John:
Well, this is a 700 unit package.
John:
The Porsche options have always been obscene.
John:
Their prices are, you know, they're expensive, right?
John:
But any Porsche you take, you're like, well, I bet I could add like $10,000 in options.
John:
Like, no, one option is $10,000, $11,000, $12,000.
John:
If you can add all the options, your car suddenly costs $263,000.
John:
And you're like, what happened?
John:
I thought I was shopping for $80,000 four-door car.
John:
And now I'm, yeah.
John:
Porsche Porsche options I mean I'm I'm assuming Porsche options are actually rivaled by like Bentley and Rolls but no one ever talks about how much those options cost because once you're shopping for that people don't talk about money anymore but every time I for the past like decade and a half ready review of Porsche they're like oh and Porsche's options I don't know what they're thinking but like if you want anything it's thousands thousands of dollars doesn't make any sense there are 24 is that right no 22 911s
John:
22 how how is that a thing people like options i mean like if it makes sense of portrait like you do you want to pay i mean like all right so fine you're going to pay fifteen thousand dollars for the carbon ceramic brakes do you feel like paying seven thousand dollars for a different headliner on the interior all right we'll charge you that whatever dude like how do you feel about special headlights for three thousand dollars yes okay check that box sold it just it adds up really fast
Casey:
I apologize.
Casey:
I derailed us.
Casey:
I never looked at buying a Porsche, not that I'm really looking at it now, and I'm just flummoxed by how many options you have.
Casey:
If you can't buy a freaking tube of toothpaste, you'll never be able to buy a Porsche.
Marco:
Let me teach you a valuable lesson about this podcast.
Marco:
Never apologize for derailing the show.
Casey:
Well, I can't trust your judgment on this issue.
Casey:
Have you listened to Top 4?
Casey:
It's a total train wreck.
Casey:
A delightful train wreck, but a train wreck.
Casey:
Which, by the way, listening to John try to keep you within the guardrails on that episode was just wonderful.
Casey:
It was hysterical.
John:
I felt like I kept things contained better than average, I'm going to say.
John:
Better than the average show.
Casey:
Still not well.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So anyway, we have totally derailed.
Casey:
So tell us about the Tesla.
Casey:
How was the pickup experience?
Casey:
You've only had it for like two days so far.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
How is it?
Marco:
So the pickup experience, I should just say, I mean, we've talked in the past in Neutral and in the after shows here.
Marco:
About different car companies having different dealer experiences.
Marco:
And a lot of it just depends on your local dealers.
Marco:
But sometimes it does seem like the way the company is set up, certain companies have better or worse dealers and dealer attitudes than others.
Marco:
But Tesla, I've been to two different Tesla dealers and talked to a few other people on the phone here and there.
Marco:
And they've all been awesome.
Marco:
super low pressure.
Marco:
I think the salespeople are not commissioned, and so I think that contributes a lot to the easier-going nature of talking to them.
Marco:
But overall, just really positive experiences dealing with Tesla so far.
Marco:
Granted, I haven't had to get tricky service or anything yet, but I know some people who have had Teslas for a while, and they've all reported very positive things about even the service and stuff like that.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
so far incredibly positive experiences dealing with them as a company there's no negotiation on the prices which also makes things a little bit nicer and simpler like you literally order your car online like you can call them and you can you can go into the showroom and you can order it there if you want to but ordering it there is just you using a computer with their pub with their public website on it and you just place the order with them if you want to so like
Marco:
It's really, it's refreshingly simple and nice.
Marco:
And everybody who works for Tesla, who I've interacted with, seems like they were from California.
Marco:
Super like, you know, laid back, like nice, you know, trendy.
Marco:
Yeah, super nice people.
Marco:
So very, very positive experiences there.
Marco:
The pickup was just like any other car pickup where, you know, you pick it up, you sign some papers, you transfer the license plate and registration.
Casey:
Oh, so that did work out.
Marco:
Yes, I got to keep my blue license plate, my blue and white New York plate instead of the ugly new yellow ones.
Marco:
This is now the third car this plate will be on because I refused to upgrade to the yellow ones because they're hideous on every color of car.
John:
So it was just like any other car pickup.
John:
You just walk down the stairs and your car is on a rotating platform with the battery connected through the floor.
John:
And then you go outside and you're in a different country and you drive on the road 140 miles an hour.
John:
So pretty much like every other car pickup.
John:
Exactly like every other car pickup, yeah.
Casey:
I re-listened to that partially because I think Underscored said he had just re-listened to that episode of Neutral.
Casey:
And man, I felt so bad for John because you really got kind of browbeat into being on that with us.
Casey:
But God, it was a fun episode and a fun trip.
Casey:
But anyway.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So, you know, they walked me through like the features of the car and everything.
Casey:
Which you promptly forgot.
Marco:
I have actually read some of the manual.
Marco:
I will have you know.
Marco:
More than five pages?
Marco:
He knows how to open the trunk, at least.
Marco:
I read, I think, four pages of the manual because a lot of the features of the car are not intuitive.
Marco:
Like, for instance, the rules of when and how it locks and unlocks is actually not obvious.
Marco:
So I've had to look up things like, so how do I turn it off if I'm sitting in it?
Marco:
Like, there's...
Marco:
There's a lot of things like that that are not intuitive.
Marco:
Anyway, so I actually have referred to the manual a few times.
Marco:
So going over the car, taking it out and everything.
Marco:
Granted, I'm only two days into owning it, as you said.
Marco:
So take all of this with a grain of salt.
Marco:
I might change my mind later.
Marco:
But at the moment, I mentioned how sad I was to give up the M5.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
i'm not sad anymore like once i got i was very sad for like the two hours between when i when i turned it in and when i picked up a tesla and i really was worrying like i wonder if i made the wrong decision here um really i really was yeah and until i until i started driving the tesla and
Marco:
It reminded me why I went to Tesla in the first place, why I decided to make this move.
Marco:
Never drive a Tesla if you don't intend to possibly buy one because when you drive it, it really – I'm not going to say it's disruptive because that's an abused term and disruption usually is involved with low-end disruption.
Marco:
This is definitely not low-end disruption, at least not yet.
Marco:
But it is transformative in the sense that once you drive an all-electric car, especially a good one like a Tesla, but even the lower-end all-electric cars like the Chevy Volt and the Nissan Leaf and stuff like that that are much more affordable, even those have this property where… Chevy Volt's not all-electric.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Sorry, the Bolt, and it doesn't matter.
Marco:
The Leaf is the only one anybody buys, right?
Marco:
Anyway, so all electric cars have this property.
Marco:
Once you drive it, it feels so different, and in my opinion, so much better than driving a gas car.
Marco:
It makes gas cars seem like old clunkers, and it makes them seem irrelevant to the point where now that I'm in the electric car mindset and I'm feeling how they feel and how they drive and seeing how they work and the advantages they have, there is no gas car on the market that I want.
Marco:
If BMW comes out with the next M5, which is probably going to have all-wheel drive and probably coming out in a couple of years, I don't think I'm going to care because I don't want a gas car.
Marco:
Once you get used to the benefits of electric...
Marco:
There are still benefits to gas.
Marco:
Long highway range is a big one.
Marco:
That electric is not only not there yet but probably will never be there for maybe our lifetimes or at least a big part of them just because of the rate that battery technology improves.
Marco:
But, my God, it is so different.
Marco:
It feels, acceleration-wise, like... I got the 90D, not the fast, crazy fast one.
Marco:
That's the P version.
Marco:
I didn't get those.
Marco:
I feel like such a douche for even talking about this, because I know these are very expensive cars I'm talking about.
Marco:
But, I don't know.
Marco:
If you think I'm an a**hole, you probably stopped listening by now.
Marco:
If you haven't, stop now.
Marco:
Sorry about that.
Marco:
But, anyway...
Marco:
So, first of all, it feels like I'm driving a train because trains are usually electric.
Marco:
I spend a lot of time on trains, commuter rails and subways and everything.
Marco:
And trains are electric.
Marco:
The way they accelerate, it has a certain feel to it.
Marco:
Electric cars accelerate like electric trains do.
Marco:
Just like the torque curve, the way they feel off the line, the way they sound even.
Marco:
It feels like I'm driving this incredibly smooth, futuristic, awesomely powerful thing in a way that gas cars, even very powerful gas cars, just can't feel.
Marco:
They just can't do that.
Marco:
Even now, buying the middle-of-the-road configuration of the Tesla, it's so ridiculously good.
Marco:
And it's so ridiculously fast.
Marco:
I'm so glad I didn't get the faster one.
Marco:
Because the faster one is a big price jump and a big hit to range for a difference of speed that not only do I not need, but that I described when we last talked about this as actually unpleasant to me.
Marco:
It was actually too fast and kind of felt like I was being punched in the face when I tested that one.
Marco:
So this is a really good configuration for me so far.
Marco:
And I haven't taken a big trip with it yet.
Marco:
I haven't put up to a full supercharger and had to wait 40 minutes to even start my charge yet.
Marco:
I'm sure I'm going to have experiences with this car over the next three years that I'm leasing it.
Marco:
I'm sure I'm going to have experiences that aren't all Roses.
Marco:
But the everyday driving around town, which is what I do the vast majority of the time, is just amazing in it so far.
Marco:
It really is great.
Marco:
I'm even sold on the touchscreen.
Casey:
I don't know about that.
Marco:
Again, ask me again in a few months.
Marco:
Maybe these things will change.
Marco:
But so many things, just the way it does things, the advancements it has...
Marco:
And the interior quality isn't as good as BMW.
Marco:
The sheet metal isn't as good.
Marco:
Most of the car's other aspects besides the drivetrain are actually a step down from what BMW offers in their high-end configurations.
Marco:
And I don't care.
Marco:
That's how good the drivetrain is.
Marco:
I just don't care about that step down.
Marco:
And that's why I'm saying this is truly transformative slash disruptive because it makes you ignore the downsides and not care about the deficiencies because the core of it, the drivetrain, the feel, the handling, it just feels so good.
Marco:
it makes you forgive all the little, you know, little nitpicks that you might have.
Casey:
So what's your favorite thing so far?
Marco:
Just driving.
Marco:
Like it's, I'm like, you know, I'm being stupid.
Marco:
I'm like, you know, finding a reason to go run stupid local errands, like just to get me out of the house into the car again.
Marco:
Like just, it's just, it just feels so good.
Marco:
It's, it's so, it's so incredibly smooth and immediate and direct feeling.
Marco:
It's just, it's just ridiculously good.
Marco:
the more time I spend in it, the more I like it, the more I appreciate it.
Casey:
Um, underscore also has a 90 D if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
And, um, he visited down here.
Casey:
Um, I think it was right after Thanksgiving, around Thanksgiving, sometime around then.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
And I drove his car, which I think we briefly spoke about on the show, actually, and it ruined my car immediately.
Casey:
There are things that I don't like about it, but I'm sure if I had one, I would suffer through and learn to live with it.
Casey:
I didn't care for the touchscreen, though it did make a lot more sense when I was in the car and seeing all the things I could tweak and configure.
Casey:
It did make a lot more sense than I would have expected.
Casey:
The regenerative braking is really peculiar.
Casey:
I didn't really like it, but I wouldn't say I disliked it either.
Casey:
It was just very, very different and weird.
Marco:
Well, that's an option you can turn down also.
Casey:
Yeah, but I mean, at the cost of range, of course.
Casey:
A little bit.
Casey:
But yeah, well, still.
Casey:
The things that that car can do, though, both performance-wise and technology-wise, are tremendous.
Casey:
Like, Underscore was saying, if I recall correctly, that he had set up his car such that when he pulls up to his house...
Casey:
It opens the garage, which is a totally Apple thing to do, right?
Casey:
Like it has a GPS on it.
Casey:
It has a garage door opener on it.
Casey:
Tell it this is my house.
Casey:
This is where I need to use the garage door.
Casey:
So just open the damn garage.
Casey:
Like it's it's such an obvious thing to do that I never thought of until he said, oh, yeah, it totally does that for me.
Casey:
And I think he said you could even tell it to raise the suspension a little bit when he's arriving at the house to give him a little extra room to go over, like, the curb or whatever it is, or the lip.
Casey:
You know, stupid stuff like that, but...
Casey:
Really smart, you know what I mean?
Casey:
And stuff like that, it was just so impressive.
Casey:
And the fact that it had an app that didn't suck, like I haven't been able to use the BMW Connect or whatever it is app.
Casey:
Well, it was comparatively less sucky than the BMW app that I had used two years ago.
Marco:
Fortunately, there are third-party apps because they just reverse-engineered the API that the official app was calling.
Casey:
Oh, that's totally safe.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, the API can't do anything harmful.
Marco:
It's like, it can't like stop the car or make it go.
Marco:
It can just like, you know, it can like open the sunroof and turn the heat on and stuff like that.
Marco:
It's like, it's not that big of a deal, but wow.
Marco:
It even, yeah, like, you know, it's simple things like, as you said, like the garage door opening and it closes when you leave too.
Marco:
Like if you, when you pull out of the driveway to leave, it can close the garage for you.
Marco:
And then when you come back home, it opens it for you.
Marco:
You're right.
Marco:
Stuff like that.
Marco:
It's, it's just really nice.
Marco:
I mean,
Marco:
And even having the big touch screen, like one of the reasons I'm kind of converting to the big touch screen now and appreciating it is like it makes certain things possible or better that you wouldn't necessarily expect from a car.
Marco:
For instance, you know, it just shows a Google Maps view and you can turn it on satellite.
Marco:
You can turn on traffic overlays and everything.
Marco:
So you're getting like really, you know, well-reported traffic overlay, traffic data.
Marco:
I just leave the map on all the time now, even when I'm doing local errands, which is most of my driving, because I have multiple routes I can use to get to places I'm going.
Marco:
And I can see the traffic on this giant map screen of where I'm going without having to program in a destination, without having to make a trip out of it, like GPS-wise.
Marco:
I can just glance at the screen casually and I can see, oh, that avenue over there is all full of red.
Marco:
Let me take the other way.
Marco:
Just little stuff like that.
Marco:
The screen enables little stuff like that.
Marco:
Or even just because it's so tall, it has these different modes where you can have one app taking up the whole screen or you can split it and you can have a top and a bottom app.
Marco:
and it's such a large screen that you can have like navigation as one of those things and the other one could be like the media player or something else like it it's nice having all of that on one screen whereas the other you know the other cars i've used they've had these much smaller system screens where you you know you kind of have to like switch modes between different things and it's then you got to wait and you got it's kind of laggy sometimes and
Marco:
and so i mean again and the tesla one is not perfect um it isn't as fast as i think it should be for a car of this caliber um i think i i have to double check with this i think i hear a hard drive in there oh interesting as opposed to an ssd i think i'm hearing like if i'm if i'm doing stuff in the car and it's parked like i was like setting up the music system it was parked so everything was like dead silent i think they're just piping that in to make you feel more comfortable that's it yeah fake hard recorded audio
John:
They know the age of the people who buy these things, and they want them to feel like they're in a familiar place with spinning hard drives.
Marco:
Yeah, but overall, it is more responsive than the BMW system was.
Marco:
It isn't as responsive as an iPad, but it's not that far off, and it's really quite nice.
Marco:
Even simple things.
Marco:
One of the little things that I like when driving it
Marco:
First of all, when you stop it, it's dead silent.
Marco:
And the whole car is incredibly quiet, which I love.
Marco:
Coming from an M car that's made artificially louder and already is pretty loud to begin with, that's a welcome change to have a quiet car for once.
Marco:
Also, they have a cool hill hold feature where every time you stop the car fully, by default, it has a hill hold.
Marco:
So it holds the brake for you and shows a little aches on the dashboard when you know it's happening.
Marco:
So, you stop at a traffic light, and then you can just take your foot off the brake pedal for the entire time you're waiting.
Marco:
That's weird.
Marco:
Well, the whole car is weird, but at first, like, it seems weird, and then you start playing with it, and you're like, oh...
Marco:
That's really nice, actually.
Marco:
It's just simple things.
Marco:
People always ask, you know, so far about the autopilot stuff and the auto drive and the summoning and everything.
Marco:
And I did autopilot on the test drive.
Marco:
I haven't done summoning or anything else.
Marco:
And I'm probably not going to use these things a lot.
Marco:
I'm a little bit scared to use a beta feature to pull my brand new car in and out of my very tight garage.
Marco:
Oh, come on.
Marco:
I'm probably not going to be doing a lot of that.
Casey:
Speaking of, you got rid of that frigging M5 and you and I never did a launch control start.
Casey:
Oh, I'm so angry right now.
Casey:
I completely forgot about that.
Marco:
I didn't forget about that.
Marco:
And I actually considered doing one on the day I turned it in, like just that morning.
Casey:
Why wouldn't you have?
Marco:
Because I had three-year-old tires and it was raining.
Marco:
Oh, Marco.
Marco:
I was like, you know, I don't think, because even a regular, even a non-launch controlled start in that car, the rear tires would just spin.
Casey:
I remember.
Casey:
I'm so disappointed in you right now.
Casey:
I'm not even mad.
Casey:
I'm just disappointed.
Casey:
Of course.
Casey:
Well, that's okay, though.
Casey:
I'm really curious to see how this goes a couple of different times.
Casey:
I'm curious to see how this goes the next time you go upstate, either to your family or TIFF's family, because TIFF's family is like right on the ragged edge of your available range, right?
Right.
Marco:
The short answer is I don't know yet.
Marco:
By the rated range, which of course nobody actually achieves, there's tons of headroom.
Marco:
By the actual range driven, it seems as though I will probably have enough range to get there and back on one charge, but without a lot of headroom, so I probably won't want to do that.
Marco:
I will probably be plugging in there.
Marco:
They have, surprisingly, an extra dryer outlet that is...
Marco:
Which I know most people don't have, but they happen to have one because it's upstate and it's crazy up there.
Marco:
So they have an extra dryer outlet that is within close distance of where I could park.
Marco:
So I'll probably plug in there with an adapter.
Marco:
But, you know, it's fine.
Marco:
I mean, and all the rest of the time in my life, I never have to go to a gas station again.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
But then if you come visit us, that's something like a 400 mile drive, which you're just not going to be able to do on one charge.
Casey:
And so then you're going to have to do the supercharger dance.
Casey:
Now, to be fair, the superchargers started, I think, on the 95 corridor, which is the road that that runs almost directly between you and I.
Casey:
So if you're going to choose a place to test out the superchargers, it's a pretty good place to do it because, I mean, they have plenty of them.
Casey:
But it's still a fairly considerable distance and long enough that you would probably have to stop once, if not twice, adding a not inconsiderable amount of time to an already like six to eight hour trip to 10, depending on what time you're going.
Casey:
So, I'm curious to see if you guys have a reason to visit again.
Casey:
Like, I don't know, maybe if Top Gear or something similar to Top Gear comes out in the fall.
Casey:
I'm curious to see how that trip goes.
Marco:
Yeah, me too.
Marco:
I mean, it could be totally fine.
Marco:
It could make us think, oh, you know what, we should bring a gas car next time we come down here.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Every time I drive to your house, I regret some part of the drive, because there is no good way to drive to your house and back without hitting some kind of massive traffic problem like this.
Casey:
Well, I found a way that's, if not good, it's not bad, at the very least.
Casey:
At the worst, it's meh, which is an improvement, because I tell you what, the Washington Corridor on I-95, at any time when any human being on the planet could possibly be awake...
Casey:
is a disaster so if you avoid that whole corridor which i think you guys took that route once and then i think you ended up in like some other disaster by pure dumb luck bad luck but anyways there are ways to avoid the bad spots but but you're still it's it's crapshoot no matter what i don't know i've been talking a lot you've been talking a lot john what are your thoughts and questions
John:
Well, two days in, I don't know.
John:
I mean, I really feel like he does have to live with it longer, especially the touchscreen stuff, because you've articulated the advantages of that very well, and I totally see all those advantages, but I still just wonder about the minute extra hassle of adjusting the temperature by having to change a screen before you can hit a button, as opposed to a button that's always there.
John:
I'm annoyed by the physical buttons in my accord, and those are physical buttons.
John:
I'm just annoyed by the fact that they're bad physical buttons.
John:
If I had to change a screen to get to it,
Marco:
yeah i don't know um well and and to be fair um i mean first of all this is kind of like like you know transmissions that were bad always annoyed me and now i just don't have one and it's fine you know maybe having no buttons for you is better than having bad buttons if you're not a if you're not a climate control micromanager like i am you won't bother you as much
Marco:
I'm not a climate control micromanager.
Marco:
I tend to just set it and forget it, like the TV commercials always say.
Marco:
I tend to not play with it very often.
Marco:
Also, to be fair, Tesla climate controls are always on screen, and they're always in the same spot.
Marco:
They're always on that bottom row.
Marco:
So you don't have to change modes to get there.
Marco:
They're always there.
Marco:
So if you do want to make a quick little adjustment, you can, and you don't have to change screens.
Marco:
That being said, there are actually a good number of buttons.
Marco:
They're, like, all around the wheel.
Marco:
There's levers and buttons, like, all over the steering wheel.
Marco:
And some of them are even customizable.
Marco:
You can remap them to do certain things.
Marco:
So, actually, like, I found, like, I was worried about the cruise control controls.
Marco:
Like, for, you know, because, like, you know, most good cruise controls, you can, like, manually, like, set and you can, like, raise it up and down by, like, one mile per hour or five miles per hour, like, by certain gestures or certain pushing of levers.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Tesla offers that too like they have a lever on the side of the steering wheel that's the cruise control lever it's actually easier than BMW because like most other cars you have to turn the cruise control on as an explicit action and it's off by default whenever you turn the car on but Tesla it's always available you just hit it and it sets like it's like you actually you actually save a step stuff like that like it's it's actually surprisingly well designed even in its physical controls
John:
for a car that appears at first glance to not have any physical controls so at least you have the option of upgrading your controls like the the thing that annoys me the most the biggest downgrade in honda's climate controls and the series of hondas that i've had is the switch from individual buttons for for modes in terms of top vent bottom vent uh you know uh feet and uh uh
John:
defogger you know like all the different modes of how air can come out of the various vents in your car the switch from having a dedicated button for every single one of those to a single button that cycles through them cycling through is is the worst nobody wants that so on your tesla does it have a mode switch to cycle through the modes or does it have separate buttons for all of them
John:
You don't even know yet?
John:
Yeah, I don't really know yet.
John:
The bad thing is that they're not real buttons.
John:
They're just a bunch of things on a screen that's hard to find if you're not looking.
John:
The good thing is that if they don't have a good setup, you can just wait for the next software update and there's a chance that they will change, whereas my buttons are never going to get better.
John:
Right, right.
Casey:
That's funny.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's interesting to see what you think of this after a while.
Casey:
Speaking of the climate control, though, is there an all mode?
Casey:
Yes, there is.
Casey:
That you're missing from the M5?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
The M5 had it.
Marco:
It did?
Marco:
The BMW 5 Series and the older 3 Series have all modes.
Marco:
Mine does.
Marco:
Yeah, yours does.
Marco:
The current 3 and 4 Series does not have an all button.
Marco:
So with the current 3 and 4 Series BMWs, if you want to raise the temperature of the whole car by one degree, you have to turn two different knobs once.
John:
i like the idea of uh you know whoever came up with that whoever marketing person came up with like passenger driver split climate control and then front and rear split climate control the same person who came up with non-smoking sections in restaurants yeah exactly you're on the same air you're on the same air guys like there's a limit i know you know someone can feel better with warm air blowing on them versus cold air blowing them but bottom line that's not a big space you're on the same car well but it's just it's just crazy making to me the bmw's current three and four series and
John:
Yeah, that's worse.
John:
That's like a fallout of like, so someone came up with this marketing feature that made people feel like it sounds, oh, it sounds good.
John:
You know, we're always different temperatures and this will fix things when it really won't fix them.
John:
And then on top of that, to build a missed feature that's like, not only did we make the silly feature, but even if you don't want it, now it adds complication to what used to be a simple thing.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Like now you have to adjust temperature twice every single time.
Marco:
Like that's crazy.
Marco:
Like at that point, why not just have single zone climate control at that point?
John:
My car, this is my first car to have dual zone climate control.
John:
My current Honda is the first.
John:
I mean, if I could have bought it without it, I would have, but it has come standard.
John:
uh and it annoys me because i a i never want to use it uh mostly because i'm usually the only person driving the car and b the stupid button for in honda it's it's not an all button it's a sync button basically when sync is on everything you do to the climate control affects the whole car which is how it should be all the time right and when i go for other buttons on this completely smooth seemingly featureless expanse of buttons that are defined by slices into the smooth featureless expanse i
John:
you know if i'm wearing gloves or whatever i accidentally bump the sync button and don't notice until like a day later when i realize i've been adjusting the temperature just for quote unquote my side of the car and the other side of the car is is still set to you know totally the wrong temperature and it's terrible
Casey:
I will tell you what, though, my Subaru was the first car I had a dual zone climate, and I love it because Aaron is usually cold and I am usually warm and being able to adjust each independently is wonderful.
Casey:
However, the Subaru did not have an all button, and my life improved dramatically when I bought the BMW, if for no other reason than because of the all button.
Casey:
Because then I actually tended to micromanage a lot more in the Subaru anyway.
Casey:
But anytime I adjust the air in the BMW, I just have to spin one little spinner, one or two notches.
Casey:
And they're delightful little notches.
Casey:
They're really crisp, really well built, really well done, as only the Germans and probably the Japanese can.
Casey:
It's so much better that way.
Casey:
But you could not pay me enough money to buy a car with one zone climate control.
Casey:
That is insanity to my eyes.
Marco:
I guarantee you John would have a problem with the knob feel somewhere.
John:
Oh, I know.
John:
What I would kill for a knob is another downgrade of the Accord.
John:
I don't even have a knob.
John:
I have up and down buttons.
John:
huge up and down buttons that are like and the same type of thing there's a little bit more of a division between them but like it's so clearly that like they designed these buttons to look nice and not to be distinguishable as individual buttons and of all the things like i'm glad i have a knob for volume although honestly i just use a steering wheel controls for mostly for that which is not a knob
John:
but you know a knob for fan speed please instead of that's the worst that's like the arrow keys in the old apple remember the old apple keyboard layouts where they didn't have the inverted t even the half size one instead they had four keys next to each other that was like i forget the order but like oh yeah left right up down well so this is the this is the microcosm i have up and down fan speed buttons is up on the left or is down on the left
John:
it's completely arbitrary it was just like i have a picture of my head i don't even know which one it is now but every time i've got to think about it and fumble around and figure it out i would love a knob for that and i would love a knob for temperature instead of a granted very large like red upward facing arrow button and blue downward facing arrow button for temperature my kingdom for a knob two knobs