Paying for Someone to Blame
John:
uh i'm actually fighting with a fly in my arm marco will hear the fly later distracted by trying to track down and kill this fly i'll i'll get it eventually i feel like i have to we have to take a break from the show for me to hunt it down uh but anyway do you want me to lend you an ipad too i've forgotten about that oh my god that's old school oh my goodness talk amongst yourselves for a moment i will kill or shoo this fly out of the room it needs to be done hang on
John:
This fly did not want to leave, did not want to die.
John:
How did you convince it?
Marco:
Did you argue with it until it realized it was wrong?
John:
I would have killed it if I could have caught it, but it wouldn't land.
John:
I was trying to get it to leave the room, so I was turning off the lights in this room and turning on bright lights elsewhere to try to lure it out.
Marco:
If you want, we can start talking about destiny.
Marco:
It'll leave immediately.
Marco:
Truth.
John:
Just bore it out of the room.
John:
No, flies love destiny.
Casey:
So a friend of the show, Dave Nanian, wrote in and he has opinions about universal remotes and things of that nature.
John:
Of super duper fame, Dave Nanian.
Casey:
Yep, that's right.
John:
One of a backup application that you should use or equivalent to make multiple backups of your stuff.
John:
Anyway.
Casey:
He's not talking about universal remotes.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
He's talking about CEC.
John:
Yeah, he has very often been the proponent of the spend a lot of money to solve your electronics problem solution, which is one possible solution.
John:
I've never been particularly a fan of it because I feel like I'm shocked.
John:
No matter how, not because I don't want to spend a lot of money on things.
John:
I have a really expensive TV, but I feel like no matter how much money you spend, it will still never work right.
John:
And you'll feel worse if you spent a lot more money.
John:
But anyway, he's happy with his setup.
John:
He has Bang & Olufsen stuff, and he has a Bang & Olufsen TV, which itself acts as, like, the hub for everything.
John:
It's like six HDMI inputs and built-in sound system that you can connect, like, 18 speakers to the TV, and it does wireless stuff, and it integrates with, like, home control systems so you can raise and lower your blinds and turn on your lights and security cameras, like all the rich people stuff that you would imagine.
John:
And because the TV itself...
John:
is the hub for all this stuff you don't have a situation like casey uh described last time of the universal remote having to track the state of all your devices and if it gets out of sync then it's very confused the tv knows the state of everything because it is the hub for everything and it can you know sense when it's getting input on the different things and the speakers are hooked up directly to the television so it takes out a lot of the guesswork um and they have all these fancy pants things where you can take all of your equipment that's big and noisy and put it in the basement and connect it with a big ethernet cable up to your
John:
system upstairs.
John:
You can hide all the stuff, all the things that you would spend thousands and thousands of dollars for.
John:
Of course, the downside of this is you have to, at the very least, have this big fancy Bang & Olufsen TV and some other proprietary components that go with it.
John:
And Bang & Olufsen
John:
doesn't really make good TVs.
John:
That's, this is a problem, right?
John:
Um, so I, the television that I have at the time that I bought it, had I bought a fancy bang and Olsen thing, I would be getting a worse television set in terms of picture quality in exchange for all this other stuff.
John:
So I'm still stuck, uh, because of my priorities, uh, buying individual components and slapping them together and trying to make do with it.
John:
But if you're willing to compromise on not having the absolute very best of every individual component, uh,
John:
You can buy an integrated solution for a tremendous amount of money that I don't think is worth it, but you'll be happy.
John:
By the way, another solution I was asking a while back on Twitter, the best solution for, we talked about this on the show, for me to get the video off of my Blu-rays.
John:
without recompressing it just preserve it exactly bit for bit the way it is on my blu-rays and then play it back on my television without having a spinning plastic disc that's make mkv isn't it that'll do it yeah but remember i was my issue was playback i can't get 24 uh frame 24 frames per second cadence playback boxes anyway we talked about that on a past show which none of us will be remembering the show notes but anyway um
John:
One of the rich person solutions to that is those boxes they sell that I think is technically legal because someone paid a lot of money to the Blu-ray association where you buy the super expensive box and you feed it either all your Blu-rays in a big jukebox or one at a time.
John:
And it basically rips your Blu-rays for you losslessly unless you play them back.
John:
But it does it in a way that like...
John:
complies with the letter of the law i don't know whatever it's not a pirate thing it's entirely legal thing but it's tremendously expensive and it's just it's like outside the amount of money i'm willing to pay for that i will just stick the disc in the dvd in the blu-ray player and deal with the spinning disc noise at this point but hopefully we'll get there eventually we're close like i said we're really close the only barrier remaining is me not having a way to play that content back on my television preserving the correct uh you know frame rate and everything without doing a spinning disc
Marco:
I should point out that I have achieved 80% of this.
Marco:
I also would have the same problem with 24 frames a second, but I don't care because I don't think I have anything of that rate, and I usually watch TV shows.
Marco:
But I ripped the entire wire Blu-ray set, and it was very, very easy with modern tools.
Marco:
Because all I had to do was use MakeMKV to rip the Blu-ray and then Subler to basically rewrap it in an MP4 container without having to transcode the video.
Marco:
Although I believe I had to transcode the audio because I don't care about surround sound.
Marco:
Please email John.
John:
You've modified it already.
Marco:
Yeah, well, who cares?
Marco:
That's optional.
Marco:
You could have left the giant AC3 and DTS tracks on there if you really wanted to.
Marco:
But I don't even have surround speakers anymore because I decided years ago they weren't worth the hassle.
Marco:
Anyway, so I was able to rip the entire TV series with Subler and MakeMKV in surprisingly little time.
Marco:
And just like this roughly $100 USB 3 Blu-ray drive that I had in the closet from a little while back.
Marco:
and uh yeah it works great and now i play them in plex and it's you know that so it has all the metadata from plex somehow magically through some probably not quite legal service and it's great i absolutely love it and it's it's way faster and more reliable and way better quality uh than the hbo go now mini app whatever it is the hbo mini app on tv it's way better than that way better quality no dropping frames issues so it isn't there it wasn't a problem with like bitrate or anything it was a problem with hbo sucking
Marco:
And yeah, overall, a great solution to watch any kind of HBO show is buy the Blu-rays and rip them all.
Marco:
It actually works surprisingly well.
Marco:
That's what I do with the content I don't actually care about.
John:
The ones I care about, I need it to be the highest possible quality.
John:
So yeah, I have tons of stuff on Plex.
John:
I have tons of things that are, you know, but...
John:
for the things i care about i want the very best quality and that's still putting the disc in a little drive but wait a minute though so the only limitation of what i was just saying is possibly audio does if the apple tv can output whatever dts whatever over the optical port then you wouldn't have any quality problems right it's not optical port you can do it over hdmi if it's smart enough a lot a lot of the applications won't send the unmodified uh
John:
audio like they won't send the dds hd stream directly to my receiver they just won't do it yeah but i bet plex would or there's probably an option plex and infuse depends on which one is in the best mood or like the ds video app i have many options to do it um but really it's the video because the most of the content i really care about i'm mostly talking about movies and they're 24 frames per second and it's a deal breaker i can't get that to my tv any other way
Marco:
And that's mainly a hardware issue, right?
Marco:
That you don't have any TV boxes that run software that could play movies and would output the right signal?
John:
it's not hardware it's software like apple tv could be changed in such a way to output 24 frames per second cadence video is my you know my playstation 3 can output that that's what i put the blu-ray into right i've even tried putting the putting the video files on the playstation 3 and having it do it but i can't get that to work either so the only time my playstation 3 outputs in this way is when it's playing a blu-ray the the apple tv is always locked at you know 60 frames per second or whatever it's outputting out and just trying you know
John:
we went through this in the past yeah but i have nothing that can do it and there's no technical reason it's not like these things aren't powerful enough or whatever a lot of people have newer televisions than mine that can do the you know the what do you call the detecting the cadence and accounting for it and everything but i've run all the video tests and it just nothing can get 24 frames per second out there except for my blu-ray player so that's what i keep using my next setup hopefully we'll be able to do it um
John:
if not it's not the end of the world like blu-ray players like it's not a thing i do frequently um and it's only for a small subset of movies so i'll just keep sticking the disc in although my solution doesn't have fan noise either but you're missing out on the things that john's eyeballs can't even see and he'll know that he's missing out on it i can see them
Casey:
So a couple thoughts, mostly on what Marco had said.
Casey:
I'd like to completely agree with him about MakeMKV.
Casey:
It is wonderful, especially as paired with, if you're willing to recompress stuff, Don Melton's compression scripts, which we've talked about in the past, and I believe I've written a post about at some point or another.
Marco:
uh if i have i'll put it in the show notes oh yeah those are awesome but but the but like nowadays like it's i mean recompressing blueberry is is still even on modern hardware still a very computer intensive pretty long running process and you can just run them in a batch overnight but it's still it still takes a lot and if you have any way to use three and a half inch hard drives as your storage medium
Marco:
So anyway, whether that's external drives in your desk or a NAS in the closet full of disks, whatever it is, three and a half inch hard drives are so massive and cheap these days that like you just have like basically infinite storage space if you can use those drives somehow.
Marco:
And so I just, you know, these days I ripped them all from Blu-rays and the whole wire series is 560 gigs from Subler and it doesn't matter at all.
Casey:
most feature films are 30 or 40 gigs i think something like that and the wire is considerably longer than that um and to go back one more step uh you were talking and i know you said it jokingly about oh some illegal way that plex gets the metadata i don't believe it's legal at all they don't use um imdb which i presume is for some sort of licensing reason or something but they do use the tv database which is the tvdb.com and the movie database which is the
Casey:
Those are less geared around browsing, in my opinion, who did what and when, and more about getting metadata about films, which is probably why Plex uses it.
Casey:
But they are, to the best of my knowledge, completely legal.
Marco:
What about all the copyrighted material on them?
Marco:
Is it one of those weird gray areas?
John:
You mean like the Google image search for movie posters and just shove them in there?
John:
Probably not really.
Casey:
Oh, that's true, actually.
Casey:
I didn't think about that.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
But anyway, anything else on video and that sort of thing?
Casey:
We have one other piece of follow-up real quick.
Marco:
oh i do have a quick bit of follow-up on my hdmi cec situation the setting was off i told you so that's a casey casey debugged your problem you're right yeah i i hadn't checked i didn't even know you could turn it off so i hadn't checked it and it was on but like it worked for months somehow it turned off it's pretty deep in the settings i'm pretty sure i wouldn't have accidentally done that since i never go to the setting screen but uh i don't know maybe maybe one of the software updates might have turned it off i don't know
Marco:
One of the features of CEC is that it can turn off CEC.
Casey:
Oh, goodness gracious.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
The last piece of follow-up we have from friend of the show, Matt Bischoff.
Casey:
John, I think, especially was talking last episode about...
Casey:
what ingredients are in what ice creams.
Casey:
And, you know, hey, in John's opinion, if I recall correctly, he said there should only be a handful of ingredients in any true and decent ice cream.
Casey:
And Matt Bischoff has done a survey of many of the popular ice cream brands that we've mentioned and even a couple of others and put together an air table, which is a site I've never heard of before, but it's very cool.
Casey:
It looks like basically...
Casey:
a google sheet or excel spreadsheet if you will but also a little bit more than that and so you can see all the different ingredients matt has included the ingredients the ingredient count calorie per serving serving size calories per gram and even links because he is that thorough is there anything that guy doesn't do pretty much perfectly i doubt it but anyway worth checking out john now that you've seen this any opinions on any of this stuff
John:
A lot of people wanted to write in and tell me why all those ingredients are in there.
John:
I know why they're in there.
John:
Unfortunately, the list of ingredients doesn't tell you what I really want to know, which I should have emphasized last time, is how much of this stuff.
John:
So the things that we're talking about that are not things that you would put in ice cream that you make in your own house with your ice cream maker, which, by the way, is really easy and everyone should do.
John:
It doesn't even take up a lot of room.
John:
You should get one.
John:
They're fun.
John:
is they're putting in ingredients to make it so that when the ice cream thaws and then refreezes you don't get those big chunky ice crystals you ever do that if you're with any ice cream you buy it from the store whatever like it thaws a little bit and like or if you're if you're a refrigerator or a freezer like say your kid leaves a door open or something or the power goes out for a long time everything kind of like melts a little bit but then it refreezes and then you take the ice cream like oh you can tell that it's melted and refrozen
John:
Um, and I, someone can find a physics video on YouTube explaining how like the, the ice crystals, like the water separates from the non-water parts and then it forms larger ice crystals and it tastes all crunchy and gross.
John:
And you don't like that.
John:
It's bad.
John:
Um, egg yolk is one, an example of like an emulsifier essentially that will keep the things mixed together.
John:
Kind of like how egg yolk and like a salad dressing will keep the oil and the vinegar mixed together.
John:
It will keep them from separating.
John:
Same thing.
John:
It'll keep like the liquid, the water from separating from the solid ingredients and making the big ice crystals when it remounts.
John:
um egg yolks are more expensive obviously almost all the other things they put in these various gums and other what they call stabilizers they're called stabilizers because they want to account for the fact that the ice cream is going to be shipped from far away in trucks with imperfect refrigeration and it's going to melt and refreeze and melt and refreeze and melt and refreeze and it didn't have these stabilizers in them that it would taste terrible it would just be like um you know big chunky water sharp ice crystals in there doesn't taste good you want it to be smooth and creamy
John:
So the cheaper ice creams, in addition to this thing, what is it called?
John:
Uh, overrun.
John:
I forget what the hell it's called, how much air they blow into it to make you buy air instead of densely packed things.
John:
That's why Haagen-Dazs is more dense than regular stuff.
John:
But anyway, setting aside the air thing, because some people just like a softer ice cream, um,
John:
The cheaper the ice cream, the more stabilizer they put in it.
John:
And they put lots and lots of stabilizers that can be very resilient to freezing and thawing.
John:
And they don't have to put any egg yolks or any other more expensive ingredient in there.
John:
And it still, you know, seems smooth and creamy no matter where you get it.
John:
So it's not just that there are stabilizers.
John:
It's how much.
John:
And the ingredient list doesn't tell you how much because they don't have amounts.
John:
It's just an order by, you know, the most ingredients that there's the most of and then the second most and so on and so forth.
John:
But it doesn't give you numbers.
John:
And my impression of the really the worst ice cream flavors is they have a lot of stabilizers and a lot of other things that affect texture and stuff.
John:
And that there's more of them that, you know, like Haagen-Dazs, a couple of their flavors have some stabilizers in them, but not a lot is my impression.
John:
And then other ones that have the exact same ingredient list.
John:
tastes like i'm eating i don't know foam rubber or something it just doesn't taste right or taste natural um so that's and this this list like going down to cold stone cream you're having 17 ingredients including like uh ethyl alcohol and artificial flavor whatever that is and triethyl citrate and you know all sorts of other things to uh uh
John:
the color, the flavor, and then to avoid all those ice crystals and everything.
John:
And what I heard from somebody was that, I don't know if it was Twitter or someone emailing me or something about Haagen-Dazs, for example, how can they get away with not having stabilizers in, for example, their vanilla ice cream?
John:
How can they do that?
John:
Because apparently they own their distribution chain and they own their own refrigerated trucks and they basically make sure that their ice cream never melts and refreezes.
John:
Because if you were to melt and refreeze Haagen-Dazs, I've done it.
John:
We had power outages and stuff.
John:
It tastes terrible.
John:
It's got all the ice crystals formed in it.
John:
no stabilizers except for egg yolks which are expensive right um so anyway try making your own ice cream try avoiding the ice creams not that have any stabilizers in them but that basically tastes like you're eating a big thing of plastic um and you'll be happier yeah i mean just try try avoiding the ones whose ingredients sound like jet fuel is basically a good rule here
Casey:
Also, a quick follow up.
Casey:
A handful of people wrote me to say, oh, I didn't know that Dryers or Breyers was Edie's where you are and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And apparently I got myself very mixed up about what's Edie's versus Dryers versus Breyers.
Casey:
And so I had commented that the slow churned, which I think I had attributed to dryers, the slow churned, which is the low fat ice cream, is actually my favorite by taste ice cream, which I know John really, really hates.
Casey:
And somebody wrote not only me, but Edie's ice cream on Twitter to say, you know, hey, what's the story?
Casey:
I thought that was Edie's.
Casey:
And it is Edie's where I am.
Casey:
I had been confused.
Casey:
And Edie's Ice Cream is written, Edie's is called Dryers West of the Rocky Mountains.
Casey:
And just FYI, it's delicious no matter what you call it.
Casey:
So thank you, Edie's social media team for correcting my unbelievable faux pas.
John:
That's one of my least favorite brands of ice cream, Edie's.
John:
Yeah, I should have recognized the container.
John:
It's the same.
John:
Dryer is just a different word on it.
John:
It's kind of like the Hellman's and Best Foods mayonnaise situation.
John:
One flavor of Edie's, though, is a flavor, this ties into last week, that I don't think is available anywhere else, that I think...
John:
tastes pretty terrible and does not taste like it tastes very artificial to me and yet i still find myself eating it which is probably bad is that they make a flavor that has basically samoa's mixed into the ice cream oh i tried that it's it i found it overwhelmingly like artificial and weird oh yeah totally it's totally it totally tastes like you're eating like
John:
uh puffy plastic with samoa's in it yes and yet i still find myself eating it so that's like i mean i don't i would never buy it willingly but sometimes it appears in the house when it does appear in the house i usually won't touch 80s at all but that one i will take some i always feel bad i always stop myself after a little tiny bit and put it back but yeah i mean i that that's the draw of the samoa's i guess but i'm repulsed by the ice cream but drawn by the broken up cookies
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
I had no idea that wasn't subscription.
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Yeah, it isn't subscription, and it's for men and women, by the way.
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Oh.
Casey:
I have done a terrible job with my duties as chief summarizer-in-chief, and I have not done my homework.
Casey:
I've pulled a Marco, and I apologize to everyone.
Marco:
Welcome.
Casey:
It's nice over here, really.
Casey:
It was very relaxing, I will admit.
Casey:
So apparently something has happened with iCloud versus Dropbox for Scrivener.
Casey:
Is that how you pronounce it?
Casey:
Scrivener syncing?
Casey:
And I don't know which one of you put this in the show notes, but I will kick it over to you to take over my duties and the mantle of... Can you guess?
Marco:
Yeah, I figured it was you, but... I also didn't hear about this, so this is going to be a short segment, I think.
Casey:
Whee!
Casey:
All right, John, tell us about Scrivener, if you please.
John:
Send me all news, and I brought it up to the top because it ties into our past discussions about APFS and the cloning of entire directory hierarchies without having to go down and copy each individual file just to clone a whole tree of the file system in a copy and write manner.
John:
which is good for Apple's file formats that are actually folders full of files.
John:
Also Scrivener is a word processing application for like, I think it's designed mostly for writing like books.
John:
You can have like notes and your outlines and plot summary and character information all tied together with your manuscript of the book that you're writing and everything.
John:
And it uses a file format that's also a directory full of files.
John:
So you can have all these different things.
John:
It's basically like a big project format, right?
John:
And they have a syncing system.
John:
And
John:
they were going to use icloud apparently but were not able to because it doesn't provide the features they need to sync their directory full of files things they're you know they're trying to be nice as much as we love icloud this is from this web page we'll link in the show notes current from the scrivener people themselves current limitations and and and difficulties with icloud mean it's not great at present
John:
It's not at present suited for the sort of complex package-based file format used by Scrivener.
John:
And you would think it would be totally suited for that because Apple has those file formats too.
John:
And, you know, the next operating system is sort of the genesis of those file formats or the popularization of them anyway.
John:
But no.
John:
um dropbox on the other hand which is what they do use for their sync solution gives them the control they need and one of their big complaints about icloud is they don't know when things will sync it's not as if they can initiate a sync and get notified when it's done things just magically appear behind the scenes in sort of a background manner and that can leave this file format this folder full files in an unknown and inconsistent state um and so what they say in this uh
John:
blog post about these technical limitations is they'd rather have users complaining they don't like manually syncing than just lost four hours of writing because of structural changes like you could end up with a document like if you sync and you think you're done and you close the lid on your laptop but didn't really finish you've got like a half finished document there and that's bad and dropbox apparently gives them the control to sync the whole thing on demand let them know when it's done and either have the thing entirely synced or entirely in the previous state um
John:
it's clear with apple's new file system that they will have at least on the local side the ability to do these operations atomically but their icloud apis with the sort of magic oh you don't need to know the details just there's a folder there and eventually the documents you want will appear everywhere and in the meantime there's like proxy documents that you can get metadata about and so on and so forth doesn't work when what you care about is not an individual file but an entire directory full of files because
John:
apparently that you know the iCloud uh drive and sync people weren't on the same page with the people writing .rtfd files and text editor maybe it doesn't matter when you've got a half finished .rtfd file may assume it will sync in the rest of the way anyway this is yet another sad story of a developer who desperately wants to use iCloud eventually having to go to a different solution very often developers roll their own solutions or they go with Dropbox or they go with something else it's sort of the the ongoing failure of
John:
iCloud to fulfill even the most basic needs of some of the best developers of Mac applications or iOS applications for that matter.
Marco:
Data syncing is hard in general and I think what we see is iCloud Drive, it's another one of these examples where like
Marco:
When iCloud interacts with the file system, it's not always great.
Marco:
It seems like CloudKit and what they've made with CloudKit is able to be really great.
Marco:
With certain apps, with certain things that go well, it's able to be really great.
Marco:
But whenever iCloud interacts with files on disk that have to exist in a file system and be interacted with in other ways as well...
Marco:
that seems like it's not even there yet.
Marco:
And I worry about that a little bit.
Marco:
But we have other solutions for that.
Marco:
We have Dropbox.
Marco:
We have, well, Dropbox.
Marco:
And it seems to work well for most people.
Marco:
So I guess it's okay now.
Marco:
I guess it's okay in the grand scheme of things.
Marco:
But it is kind of sad that Apple is still not really playing well in that game.
John:
I mean, on an individual file basis, they have most of this, but the whole idea is the difference between an API where you say, please do sync now, like even a synchronous API where you say, make this call, and when the call returns, the thing I ask to be done is done.
John:
That can work on an individual file basis, and CloudKit is much more like that in that you have the control over that.
John:
I'm not sure if they're complaining about CloudKit specifically or iCloud Drive that does it magically behind their back, but...
John:
all of that is on an individual file there's no sort of like oh this entire tree of files i want you to sync all of that and tell me when all that is done unless you're going to try to do each individual one and then what about files that have been added or removed uh there's no there's no api for to do things at that level um and the related thing that came up today uh this is about the uh sierra beta maybe i shouldn't say who's reporting this because i don't know what you're supposed to say about the sierra betas is it a public beta
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't even know the rules anymore.
John:
But anyway, we all know from the keynote that macOS CRA has this feature where it will automatically sync your desktop.
John:
Remember that?
John:
Like all the stuff on your desktop between your Macs and also apparently your documents folder.
John:
I forget what it is.
John:
When I installed it, there's like a checkbox or something that says, hey, do you want Apple to sync all this stuff in your documents folder and desktop?
John:
And I was like, hell no.
John:
For the reasons discussed in the past, like please don't.
John:
Anyway, so...
John:
uh someone someone we all know check that checkbox just to see what it was like and like la-di-da it's like especially have one computer la-di-da um it's syncing the stuff or whatever and at some point they said all right i want to stop doing that and like uncheck the checkbox and when you uncheck it it's like uh that you know the the phrasing they use like when you go into the icloud preference pane and uncheck like contacts or something or whatever and it's like
John:
keep in mind that the whatever's will no longer be available on your Mac.
Marco:
You know that phrasing?
John:
It's like their way, they don't want to say we're going to delete your stuff, but they're like, whatever you're talking about will no longer be available on your Mac or some wording like that.
John:
And I don't know if people really know what that means.
John:
I mean, it's kind of, it's accurate, but it means like, your stuff go bye-bye now.
John:
Like, it's not going to be there anymore.
John:
We are going to delete it.
John:
And this person who was checking this box is like...
John:
But this is my documents folder.
John:
Surely they don't mean they'll remove everything in my documents folder if I uncheck this checkbox, right?
John:
So this person unchecked it, and lo and behold, their documents, everything in their documents folder went away.
John:
Like, everything.
John:
Now...
John:
It's not really gone.
John:
Apparently, the system is squirreling it away in a different location.
John:
If you know where you can find it, it's still there.
John:
And you can make it come back because it's synced and all that other stuff.
John:
But this is probably working as designed.
John:
But A, this is a terrifying design.
John:
Because I don't think people expect it to happen.
John:
I think people mostly do keep everything that they care about on their desktop and in their documents folder.
John:
If they were to uncheck a checkbox and everything disappeared, even if they can get it back by rechecking, the...
John:
The panic and the trust lost by that interaction is terrible.
John:
And then the other part of that is if anything does go wrong and you check the checkbox to try to get it back and it gives you back like an old version of the file or something, which could happen because sync is really hard, that's going to be just...
John:
insult on top of injury it'll be it'd be terrible so i really hope they reconsider this interface and the whole idea that there's a series of check boxes that you can check to make stuff like one of the most important sort of user interface uh decisions that dropbox made was that
John:
The files in Dropbox, and we'll talk about this more if we ever get to Dropbox's Project Infinite, which changes this decision, but the files in your Dropbox folder are just plain files on your Mac.
John:
If you turn Dropbox off, those files are still sitting on your Mac exactly where they were.
John:
If you never run Dropbox again, those files are still just sitting there, right?
John:
They're not...
John:
Dropbox doesn't like control those files to the point where like, oh, you quit Dropbox, your entire Dropbox folder is empty.
John:
No, they're just files on your disk.
John:
And when you turn Dropbox on, it looks at its Dropbox folder and syncs them all and does all this stuff or whatever.
John:
But when you turn it off or if Dropbox crashes in the middle, everything is just exactly the way it was because they're just real files on your disk.
John:
And yes, that means that if you have five computers all using Dropbox, you have five individual different copies of those same files.
John:
And if you uninstall Dropbox from all of them, now all five computers have the same files on them, but they're just plain files on disk.
John:
Same is true of iCloud Drive, but the policy of saying when you uncheck this checkbox, the only way we can deal with it is to remove these things from your documents folder from your desktop or to blank it out or put them into a different folder even.
John:
Or do anything with them at all other than to leave them exactly where they are.
John:
is that is the wrong decision even if it works perfectly so anyway sierra is a beta i don't know if this was an intended feature a bug anything you know plenty of asterisks and caveats on this i'm not slamming an unreleased operating system but i really hope when this feature does exist that it has a better policy than that and even if it doesn't still not enabling it because i still find it really scary
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I think this is one of those problems where, you know, when you have like the folder full of files that need to be synced, there are so many weird little uncomfortable edge cases or areas where you need some kind of administrator tool.
Marco:
So, for instance, any kind of merge conflict.
Marco:
Or like what Dropbox does, which we learned about with our discussion about file names, that apparently Dropbox will create a conflict if you have two different Unicode encodings of the same name.
Marco:
It will just leave them both there and it'll rename one or both of them naming conflict or something like that.
Marco:
And if you have a merge conflict in Dropbox, it keeps both or all three files and it just renames them with parentheses at the end.
Marco:
Like, oh, you know, conflict version, whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever the format they use.
Marco:
And these are all kind of ugly solutions to real world conditions.
Marco:
But these are the kind of these are the kind of like ugly results that you kind of can't automate this away in a way that will never lose data for people or that will that will always do exactly what people want to do.
Marco:
But Apple tries to.
Marco:
So Apple seems like they're kind of institutionally allergic to adding in these kind of administrative ugliness things that even when they have to be there, like a case like a merge conflict on a file share thing, like a Dropbox folder...
Marco:
Apple's solution is usually, we're just going to guess and hope that we guess right through some kind of heuristics that will probably be right most of the time.
Marco:
And we'll just deal with it.
Marco:
That'll just be the way it's dealt with.
Marco:
And if you lose data, oh well.
Marco:
That seems to be their approach most of the time to these kind of difficult sync problems.
Marco:
But I don't think that works very well in an environment where you have people's files in folders that have always worked a certain way that people are accustomed to, that people expect and that people require for their data to be there and reliable and intact and everything.
Marco:
Apple's approach to just, we're just going to avoid giving you any kind of controls to manage the actual complexity of this problem.
Marco:
I don't think that works for files.
John:
One of the advancements of CloudKit was that it would delegate to the application to make this decision to say CloudKit will let you know that there is a conflict and you'll get this call back and it's up to you what to do about it.
John:
And you could decide in your application, I'm just going to keep all three copies and rename them with parentheses.
John:
Right.
John:
This situation with the iCloud drive or whatever, the syncing of the desktop stuff, like I said, it's more of a policy decision of saying, what should we do when they uncheck that box?
John:
I think the right decision when they uncheck that box is to just leave everything exactly the way it is on disk and not mess with it anymore.
John:
But the decision they're making is kind of the same decision they make for contacts or
John:
and all the other things that you can check and uncheck in the iCloud preference pane that they... Well, sometimes in the iCloud preference pane, they ask you, should we remove the ones or leave them on your Mac?
John:
They should ask the same thing for the documents, which again, which makes me think maybe this isn't an intentional feature.
John:
They just haven't gotten around to change that dialog box in that way.
John:
But it just goes to show that there are lots of things that you can do to confuse and frighten the user.
John:
And perhaps the worst one is making all their stuff apparently disappear.
John:
Even if it's all safely preserved, both locally in a different folder that they renamed and on the cloud...
John:
that that moment of trust you know you losing the user's trust is going to make them not want to use that product anymore and dropbox with the renaming with the garbage files and everything my experience is that happens to people and they don't even notice until like a month later and like what is this whatever is conflicted copy file here i don't quite understand that but the reason they didn't notice is because it didn't actually delete anything it always you know fails in a way that gives you
John:
extra data extra garbage files of like well i've got the file that i expected i've got two more that i didn't expect but you've got all three versions of the file and if one of them is named differently and you can't figure it out like you go there and you sort by name and you'll find there's a bunch of other files with similar you'll find your stuff like it won't as opposed to trying to pick the correct file for you or
John:
presenting some dialogue for you to choose how to resolve the conflict when you don't have enough information to do that um so dropbox solution is not great for a lot of situations where you don't want it making a bunch of garbage files but it's a good choice for just sort of a generic bin full of uh you know folder full of files without any specific purpose because it you know that they're
John:
Their strategy is the worst thing we can do is lose someone's data.
John:
It's much better to give them a bunch of garbage files than to make stuff disappear.
Casey:
Why do you think that Google Drive and like OneDrive and to some degree Box haven't tried to be that like everything sync engine that Dropbox has seemed to become?
John:
They are trying.
John:
There's different policies.
John:
Like I think Google Drive is very similar to Dropbox.
John:
I haven't actually used OneDrive, but all of them
John:
Oh, all these products, including Dropbox now with the Project Infinite thing, are dancing around the other trade-off.
John:
Like, Dropbox's thing of, hey, every single file is on your Mac, and we will sync it.
John:
And then they added Selective Sync many years ago, where you can choose which files you want to sync.
John:
Dropbox Infinite is...
John:
All right.
John:
We'll make it look like the files is my understanding.
John:
I don't actually actually use it.
John:
We'll make it look like the files are on your Mac, but really they'll be in the cloud, which makes a lot of sense in a pervasively network connected office.
John:
And it'll let you like pin.
John:
I'm assuming it will let you pin files to your Mac so they don't go away.
John:
It's it's so you can have basically more stuff in your Dropbox than will fit on your Mac or like selective on demand, selective sync, sort of like you're paging in the files from the cloud onto your Mac as you use them.
John:
And as you don't use them, they don't need to be on your Mac or
John:
Or you could say, never bring this all down my Mac, just sort of access it over the network.
John:
It's sort of a blending of NFS mounts and Dropbox, complete copying of files and all that stuff.
John:
And it does that with a kernel extension.
John:
There's a whole article about it on Dropbox's thing.
John:
It's very interesting, but it's a very different tradeoff than Dropbox makes.
John:
And it's much more dangerous because if they mess anything up there,
John:
uh bad things can happen like the the reassurance of dropbox like i said is that you can quit the dropbox app never relaunch it again and everything in that dropbox folder is exactly you know what you see is what's there none of those files are fake none of them are proxy files they're all there they're all taking up disk space on your mac you don't have to wonder which ones are where um and
John:
you know you can move things in and out of it they're not constrained in any way they don't have weird permissions on them they're just plain old files and project infinite takes that away in exchange for you not having to deal with selective sync and have you you know fill up your disk because someone in a shared folder puts a ton of stuff in there and all sorts of other downsides of the traditional dropbox model but it's
John:
a much higher degree of difficulty and i think a lot of the other vendors went right for that higher degree of difficulty and never sort of started off as simple as dropbox the advantage dropbox has had i think is that you know even before selective sync it was a very simple user model that people could understand didn't have a lot of features was so simple it could be implemented by a bunch of python scripts for crying out loud um
John:
and i think dropbox built a lot of trust and goodwill with that simple model and now they can expand like as they expand to selective sync that didn't cause people to flee because it was too confusing because it was just a tweak of the thing they understood we'll see if project infinite is a bridge too far but i think that's the big advantage that dropbox had that i think big companies like google and microsoft can't help but immediately implement all the complicated features do you plan on trying dropbox infinite
John:
i doubt it i i mean i'm i'm not dissatisfied with the plain dropbox i have a lot of disk space i do use selective sync sometimes to keep things you know from getting too big because i do have some shared folders and i really hate dropbox's policy of like shared folders count towards your quota which is ridiculous because you know they're only storing one copy of this stuff server side um probably won't especially since it uses a kernel extension but i will be curious about it so i won't rule it out
Marco:
Yeah, I don't actually plan to try it, honestly.
Marco:
I mean, maybe if, you know, on a laptop, I might try it.
Marco:
On my main computer, I definitely wouldn't.
Marco:
I'd rather just buy more hard drive space and just suck it up than run those risks and everything.
Marco:
But on a laptop, maybe.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't have that much stuff in my Dropbox.
Casey:
Well, I have nine gigs available of which I've used a little over half of it.
Casey:
So there's, I mean, there's what, four gigs, a little more, maybe even five gigs in there.
Casey:
But it's not that much.
Casey:
And even the smallest laptop can grab all of that.
Casey:
I'm still on a free Dropbox plan.
Casey:
I haven't had a need to pay for it.
Casey:
I'm not opposed to paying for it.
Casey:
I just haven't had the need to pay for it.
Casey:
So...
Marco:
I actually just started paying for it at WWDC this year.
Marco:
I finally bought it.
Marco:
So what put you over the edge?
Marco:
I wanted an easy way to quickly have a backup of the podcast files that we had recorded there.
Marco:
And it was just easier than setting up something else at that moment in the very brief time that I was sitting in the fast Ethernet area of Moscone.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Marco:
And I thought, you know what, I kept hitting it because I only had like the regular two gig limit plus like a couple hundred megs or something.
Marco:
But I kept running into that all the time with just like transferring podcast files back and forth.
Marco:
I'm like, you know, this is, you know, it's about time.
Marco:
Let me actually finally pay for this product that I've been using and running my business on for literally years.
Casey:
Yeah, makes sense.
Casey:
And I also kind of like that the Synology has Cloud Sync or something like that, which puts a copy of Dropbox on the Synology, which is neat as another backup.
Marco:
Oh, I didn't know that.
Casey:
Yeah, I think it's called Cloud Sync.
Casey:
There's one of the apps that you can install.
Casey:
I'll have to get you the name after the show.
Casey:
One of the apps you can install.
Casey:
basically acts as another Dropbox client.
Casey:
And so if you wanted to, you could have an additional backup of your Dropbox sitting on your Synology.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Thanks a lot to Eero for sponsoring our show once again.
Casey:
Apparently, Hackintoshes are still a thing.
Casey:
And Mike Rundle just built one.
Casey:
And that's about the extent of my knowledge on this scenario.
Casey:
So, John, tell us about this.
John:
Yeah, don't call it a comeback.
John:
People are always doing the Hackintosh thing.
John:
It came up again because someone did another blog post about it.
John:
And as we've been talking about...
John:
for weeks on the show about how it's basically the wrong time to buy any Mac because they're all woefully out of date with the exception of the 5k iMac maybe and I guess the little MacBook I suppose because that's fairly up to date but everything else is just has incredibly old hardware there's been lots of snarky tweets about it involving the store I think someone Marco retweeted somebody saying used to be that you made a Hackintosh to get yourself a cheap Macintosh now you do a Hackintosh just so you can run macOS on hardware that is not insanely outdated
John:
Like it's not, it's not, it's not a money saving move and it's not even like I want to build this amazing beast of a box type of move.
John:
It's more like, I just want to run my preferred operating system on hardware that was made in the past year or two.
John:
Um,
John:
So that's Apple's fault for letting that stuff go by.
John:
But every time someone builds one of these Hackintosh, people are amazed that you can essentially build a PC, which is what modern Macs are when you get down to brass tacks in terms of the components, for an incredibly small amount of money.
John:
So this was a $1,200 Hackintosh that trumps any computer you could buy from Apple at any price for the most part.
John:
uh particularly galling are things like how cheap the ram can be you know it's not apples to apples but like oh well the mac pro has ecc ram and that's why it costs more money and all these other excuses for why the ram is so much more expensive but i will cause we have tweeted just before the show apple charges 1300 for 64 gigabytes of ddr3 ram for the mac pro
John:
you can get 64 gigabytes of ddr4 ram for 275 so that is 275 versus 1300 so the same amount of ram just drop the ecc granted it is ecc versus not but that is you know that does affect the price but not that much yeah exactly i mean it's nonsensical like the price of the mac pro is is crazy pants well i will say though with with this particular case this this particular hackintosh
Marco:
It is not using the Xeon.
Marco:
It is not using the server chipset.
Marco:
It is not using ECC RAM.
Marco:
It is really an iMac, not a Mac Pro comparison here.
Marco:
And it is still a good comparison to make.
Marco:
However, this is not making a very cheap Mac Pro.
Marco:
This is making a very cheap iMac.
John:
But it's way faster than the Mac Pro, though, in every measurable way.
John:
So it doesn't really matter.
Marco:
Isn't it literally the exact same CPU that's sold in the 5K iMac?
Marco:
Probably.
John:
I mean, the 5K iMac is faster than the Mac Pro, like, you know, except for in massively parallel things where you got a 12 core, blah, blah, blah.
John:
I mean, this is a $1,200 computer.
John:
Agreed.
John:
However, it is an insult to the iMac, not the Mac Pro.
John:
Yeah, well, it's an insult to Apple's entire line.
John:
And this particular Hackintosh, whatever.
John:
You can find a million different Hackintosh builds.
John:
You can build it.
John:
That's the whole point of Hackintosh is you can build it any way you want.
John:
And so a lot of people have been asking us whether we would ever do a Hackintosh or whether this is something we've considered because we've been complaining so much about the outdated Apple hardware.
John:
And I'll speak for myself and say, I look at this and it makes me sad about Apple's product line, but I had never really considered making one myself because I
John:
Yeah.
John:
Lots of features, lots of major features just don't work on the Hackintosh because they haven't figured out how to convince the operating system to make hardware that is similar enough to Mac hardware that things will work.
John:
In particular, one that really stood out to me in this particular Hackintosh story is they still haven't got an iMessage working.
John:
And that's not like a minor feature.
John:
Yeah, that's a big thing.
John:
iMessage is a pretty like would you like to use a mac but by the way you can't use iMessage and forget about all the modern stuff that it requires like handoff continuity or you know the touch id sensor that will appear on on macbook someday forget about that stuff because that's no way they're going to be able to do that they're not going to get a to be able to get a secure enclave from apple and stick it into their pc and get the stuff to work so
John:
The amount of things that just don't work that make your Mac not really a Mac is a growing list of things.
John:
And Apple, not that they're doing it to stop hackandoshes, but Apple keeps adding to that list.
John:
And I just I don't want to deal with any of that.
John:
I just want it to work.
John:
I don't want to do a point update and have my machine not boot because the video drivers don't work anymore.
John:
I don't have to worry about any of that stuff.
John:
I just want a really good big fast and I'm willing to pay much more money.
John:
for the privilege of someone figuring this all out ahead of time and making me, and this is a nice piece of hardware that works, and this is before I get into, like, how ugly these boxes are and how much noise they might make and all the other, and the fact that you have to build it yourself, and, like, I would sooner build myself a gaming PC than I would a Hackintosh.
John:
Like, a gaming PC I've come really close to building many times in my various states of frustration, but a Hackintosh, never for me.
John:
Casey?
Casey:
Oh, would I build one?
Casey:
Hell no.
Marco:
Absolutely not.
Marco:
And you built PCs before, right?
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
For a long time.
Casey:
Basically, up until the time I started using Thinkpads exclusively, which was right before I started using MacBooks exclusively, which was before I started using the iMac.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I was always building PCs.
Casey:
Always, always, always, always.
Casey:
And first of all, I'm so far out of the game, so to speak, like I wouldn't even know where to begin.
Casey:
Like I understand the components that are necessary for a modern personal computer, but I don't know what processors are popular these days.
Casey:
I don't know what memory is the right memory to choose.
Casey:
And obviously I could figure this out, but...
Casey:
I just don't have the patience, the time, or the energy for it.
Casey:
This is a thing, especially a computer where I only buy one once every like four to eight years.
Casey:
I would much rather throw money at the problem and just have Apple fix it for me.
Casey:
That being said, the whole reason we're talking about this is because Apple is doing a very good job of avoiding taking our money.
Casey:
Well, not us.
Casey:
Maybe John, not Marco and I necessarily.
Casey:
But I mean...
Casey:
Apple's really working hard at not updating things, except the MacBook Adorable, and to some degree the iMac, like you guys said earlier.
Casey:
What's the holdup?
Casey:
I don't get it.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, there was a very long span in my life where I would gladly have built a Hackintosh.
Marco:
I was building my own PCs at the time, and it's just like building a PC with a little bit more hassle.
Marco:
But I agree with what John said that in the era of you have driver signing now, you have possible iMessage hiccups with certain Hackintosh setups and handoff and stuff being tricky to get working because of the various Wi-Fi chip hacks they do.
Marco:
It seems like we are pretty clearly moving towards a point in probably the near future where Hackintoshes won't work anymore.
Marco:
Or at least enough features won't work on them that the trade-off between pain in the buttery and whatever you're saving or gaining by having one, that might switch the other way.
Marco:
Because as Apple increases the pain in the buttery and the limitations and everything else...
Marco:
that eventually it's not worth it anymore, or at least for certain people it won't be worth it anymore.
Marco:
So I just feel like in my current set of priorities, I'm able to trade money for time to a certain degree.
Marco:
And when I was younger, when I was in college and high school building these PCs for myself and my friends, we had nothing but time, but we had very little money.
Marco:
So it made way more sense then to build our own PCs and deal with all the massive amounts of headaches and time sinks and crap that we had to deal with to build our own PCs and keep them running and keep them stable and keep them upgraded.
Marco:
It was a massive time sink for me and my friends.
Marco:
But we did it because...
Marco:
Again, that time-money continuum, the balance was different for us back then.
Marco:
Now, I think all of us involved back then would all just buy a computer from Apple and just be done with it and not have to worry about it because, quite frankly, we don't have the time to worry about it and we do have a little bit of money to spend on them so we can do that instead.
Marco:
So it all depends on whether it's worth it to you.
Marco:
And as the environment shifts, whether it's worth it will shift too.
Marco:
In this case, if Apple really does horribly neglect the Mac line for longer, for a lot longer...
Marco:
then i will probably be tempted just to get more performance you know just like in this particular case i was disappointed to see that the high-end consumer desktop chips that are beat and their platforms that are being used in this particular article the the micro article it's the exact same chip that's available in the 5k imac in the high-end configuration the four gigahertz sky lake i7 like
Marco:
so it's not this was not a case of doing something that apple won't sell you really this was more of a case of just getting what apple will sell you but for way less money and that's cool and there's a huge market for that that i totally understand but i don't think the trade-off would be worth it to me in my current state of time versus money what would be worth it possibly in the future is if apple stopped selling the mac pro and for some reason os 10 keeps supporting its hardware and
Marco:
and uh and then i can like i can get like an 8 or 12 or 16 core high-end zeon workstation running mac os 10 and apple won't sell me one that would be very interesting to me but today it's just not i don't know it's it the balance for me isn't there today
Casey:
I think we're going to get MacBook Pro, and not that this is unique, but I think we're going to get MacBook Pro updates before the end of the year.
Casey:
And I think there's a decent shot we'll get a stupid Mac Pro update before the end of the year.
Casey:
I don't think it's dead, based on no facts, just a guess.
Casey:
I don't think it's dead.
Casey:
But I should, to go back to Hackintosh specifically for a moment, when I was debating...
Casey:
Very publicly with you, Marco, whether or not I should get a Mac.
Casey:
This is 2008-ish, I believe.
Casey:
And we were having this debate via reblogs of each other's posts on Tumblr.
Casey:
What I ended up doing was taking my then ThinkPad T30, I believe it was, and putting a Hackintosh version of Leopard, I believe it was at the time.
Casey:
I might have that wrong.
Casey:
And running it for a few days just to see if I liked OS X. And to my recollection, Wi-Fi didn't work, but onboard Ethernet did.
Casey:
And just about everything else did, too.
Casey:
Maybe sound didn't, actually.
Casey:
I don't recall.
Casey:
But I remember vividly that Wi-Fi didn't work, which was a major bummer.
Casey:
But I really liked it, and it was relatively pain-free to do.
Casey:
I think I acquired some version of OS X that had been prepared for this sort of use.
Casey:
And that's what I used to install it, and it worked pretty darn well.
Casey:
And if it wasn't for that, I probably still would have bought the Mac anyway, but I felt a lot more confident in doing so.
Casey:
But just like you said, you hit the nail on the head.
Casey:
You know, today, the three of us can trade money for time, if you will.
Casey:
And when we were in college and kids, when we were building computers, except John, we had plenty of time to kill and not a lot of money.
Casey:
So it's funny how things change.
John:
it's not just the time too it's like thinking of your poor haunted imac that could die at any second uh what you're also paying for what you're also paying for is someone to blame that's true yeah if your computer goes wonky you have someone to blame and that's apple if your computer continues to be wonky continues to behave badly you can keep bringing it back to genius bar eventually replace it with an old new computer if it you know not that that's a fun thing to do like it's still a pain in the butt but if you build your own hackintosh
John:
and it starts being wonky, you have no one to go to.
John:
You certainly can't go to Apple, you can't go to your motherboard manufacturer, you can't go to your GPU vendor, you can't go to the company that made the case, you can't go to the monitor vendor, like, you've just got yourself.
John:
And so, Hackintoshes, I mean, they're way cheaper, but they're not free.
John:
So, that's, you know, that's potentially a thousand or more dollars that you spent on something, and...
John:
If it stops working or starts being weird in some way, unless it is a hardware fault, like, oh, my GPU died or my CPU died.
John:
Like if it just starts being flaky, because again, it's Hackintosh, it's running, you know, an unsupported hardware configuration that you're trying to hack to get to work.
John:
And by the way, it's not like iMessage doesn't work at all.
John:
There are these strange incantations to try to get it to work by faking it out, but it's very sketchy.
John:
If things start to act weird...
John:
you've got no one to blame and that's not tenable like maybe maybe if you lived by yourself and you could handle your main computer not working or being flaky some of the time maybe or it was like a secondary computer maybe you could handle that but in any sort of family environment where any other person is relying on that computer to be to be a computer to be to be able to sit down in front of it and like do your photos or whatever and you know like to do stuff on that computer and it doesn't work
John:
and you're the one who built this computer and you have no one to blame it's at that point you will say i would love to be able to pay to have someone to blame for this other than me because you don't want everyone looking at you and saying why does this computer that you wasted all this time on uh not work anymore and you're just like you know or why does it do this weird thing or whatever um so i think of that just as much as like the time i would spend tinkering i think of
John:
Having a single company who stands behind the supposed functionality of the entire thing.
John:
And I mean the entire thing.
John:
If something is wonky about it, like if Wi-Fi works intermittently or whatever, I don't have to prove that the Wi-Fi...
John:
uh you know chipset or whatever uh is bad and like go to that manufacturer and get them to replace it and plug it in and realize it's a conflict between like the motherboard and this other you know like i don't have to deal with any of that i just i have to deal with a hassle it's still a hassle to go to the apple store especially if you're lugging a big computer with you you still have to probably go back three times but eventually you'll get some kind of satisfaction whereas if you built it yourself at a certain point you're just like
Marco:
sell the parts off individually and try again it's it's really grim yeah i mean i've i've been like as i said like i i built a good number of computers for myself and my friends throughout high school and college and i've been in that position of like something doesn't work especially if it's not even on my computer it usually wasn't something doesn't work on one of my friends computers or worse on a computer that somebody paid me a little bit of money to build for them and i
Marco:
And it's just an endless sinkhole of time and possibly my own money trying to resolve this problem.
Marco:
And meanwhile, dealing with a very upset person who is very annoyed that this computer that they...
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
On the flip side of this Mike Rundle Hackintosh here, the biggest feature for me is not the fact that it's always a cheaper iMac, is that he could pick any GPU that he wanted to put in there.
John:
Of course.
John:
He put it in a better one that's in the iMac, and he could have put an even better one there.
John:
In fact, he can change his mind two years later and get an even better GPU.
John:
And that's an option Apple doesn't give you at all.
John:
Apple will give you that CPU that will not give you this GPU or the option to put in a better one.
Casey:
And this sounds impressive, but I agree that without iMessage on this Mac, no thanks.
Casey:
Hard pass.
Marco:
Well, yeah, it's this balance, right?
Marco:
And I think what we're all saying is we all would have reasons why we might want to build one of these things if things got worse.
Marco:
As the conditions change, we might build Akintoshes in three years or something.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
We have no idea what...
Marco:
what will hold but like if if your priorities are just very slightly different or if your needs are just very slightly different from us you could very easily fall on the on the other side of that balance and this could make total sense for you yeah yeah this list of things that don't work like airdrop i use a lot and i think i'm the airdrop unicorn because it almost always works for me i honestly i have very good luck with airdrop as well
John:
yeah uh all his audio doesn't work like the first item like you mentioned before casey i think everything worked when i installed effort except for wi-fi oh yeah and audio it's like what is this linux minor features like wi-fi and audio don't work but otherwise it's perfect like audio doesn't work you have a non-functional computer it's like saying my tv is great it's just there's no sound
Casey:
It's so true.
Casey:
I genuinely had forgotten that audio maybe didn't work.
Casey:
But yeah, looking at this list, audio doesn't work.
Casey:
Continuity and handoff don't work.
Casey:
Those I don't use that much.
Casey:
iMessage doesn't work, I'm out.
Casey:
AirDrop doesn't work, I'm out again.
Casey:
Well, I was already out with audio, come to think of it.
John:
And Touch ID doesn't work.
John:
Apple just keeps accumulating these things.
John:
I think once people get used to unlocking their laptop with Touch ID...
John:
a hackintosh is good it's like it's like having a hackintosh with no wi-fi and you know before wi-fi was a big deal just added on the toilet seat to imax or ibooks rather and it's like well you know wi-fi doesn't work but who uses that at a certain point you're like wi-fi doesn't work this is junk throw it away like i can't a laptop without wi-fi is pointless right i have touch id and features like that will probably eventually feel like that like i'm not going to type in my password every time i unlock my computer that's barbaric and so and you you can be pretty sure that it's going to be very difficult to
John:
to simulate the secure enclave touch id hardware whatever that apple adds to their laptops even if you can somehow source that part from the far east and get it installed in your hackintosh that's that's a hell of a challenge
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John:
speaking of hackintoshes i was recalling from the olden days when you two probably weren't born yet um one of the original hackintosh type things like in the early days of the mac it was very difficult to clone it not the least of us because you needed the mac rom was a like a lot of most of the mac toolbox was on on the rom chip and that was proprietary apple and you couldn't really buy that part and
John:
So it was very difficult to have any sort of legitimate commercial business selling Mac clones because you couldn't have a Mac without that ROM.
John:
And then on top of that, all the other problems.
John:
But there was one company that used to advertise in Mac magazines, like a legitimate company.
John:
I think they were in Australia, maybe, called Outbound.
John:
I'm trying to Google for it while you're going to the last ad.
John:
And my recollection is they would basically get around the cloning by...
John:
buying actual real apple stuff or requiring you to buy them or whatever and repackaging it so they would take like a mac plus motherboard or a mac se motherboard and put it into kind of a laptop shape with a big battery and everything so they were very very expensive you weren't saving any money but you could buy a basically real macintosh
John:
as far as the operating system was concerned in a case not made by apple simply by adding a tremendous amount of cost it's almost kind of like when you buy like a a tuner car where you're like just buy a basic mustang and then add a hundred thousand dollars right you start off you start with the mustang as delivered to you by ford and then you just add lots of money so you start with a mac se or mac plus and then they just take out the insides repackage them in a different thing and sell you the new thing and then add money on top of that um kind of like the uh the mod book people from a few years back right
John:
yeah similar to that but like you know going from a a desktop computer to a laptop is quite a transition and they had the really weird pointing device that looked like i don't know if you guys ever saw this i don't think it ever caught on because it's pretty terrible if you can imagine your space bar replaced by a pencil like you know a pencil horizontal pencil and you put put your thumb on the pencil and as you roll the pencil you know just rolling it that makes your cursor go up and down and as you slide your finger left and right on the pencil that makes the cursor go left and right
John:
what it was called okay it was not a good pointing device um but it was it was an interesting way like before trackpads they wanted to to have a pointing device that didn't take up a lot of room so they didn't have the nubbin at this point i think this predates the nubbin and they didn't have a trackpad and there wasn't room for that anyway so they had below the space bar this whatever this was like what is it called
John:
iso point track bar there you go i googling uh say i don't know why i was called iso point anyway it didn't catch on for a reason but uh yeah there's a long history of people trying to essentially have a mac but not have a mac uh and i think everything has been tried including actual legitimate cloning which hopefully you guys either don't remember or have blocked out of your mind
Marco:
and that was before our time as mac users but i mean like all these things like these make sense you know like that crazy company was around when there wasn't a mac laptop the people who made modbook and everything that was before the ipad and there was no like there was no like mac cintiq basically is what they were trying to make and and i don't know if they still make them anyway and and hackintoshes are around because there's no what everyone calls the x mac which is like there's basically no like
Marco:
cheap desktop tower Mac that's just expandable with regular slots.
Marco:
Like, the Mac Pro used to kind of almost be that, except it wasn't cheap, and now we don't even have that anymore.
Marco:
So, you know, and so Hackintoshes and all these things, they serve needs that Apple refuses to serve for whatever reason, whether they're not profitable or whether they're just too specialized and not enough people would buy them, or whether they don't fit into...
Marco:
johnny ives magic white room because they have too many ports and they have they're too expandable and you know they're too useful i don't know uh but apple refused to serve these markets you know they're going to get served somehow and either they're going to get served by crappy pcs with other stuff or they're going to get served with illegal pirated copies of os 10 i'm not really sure which is worse for apple but i'm guessing keeping people in the apple ecosystem even illegally is probably better for apple long term
Casey:
That's an interesting point.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
This is all going to get resolved this fall when they release all the new hardware and everyone will be happy except you two.
John:
And Mac Mini owners will also be sad.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, we at least talk from this position of privilege that Apple at least occasionally mentions our computers.
Marco:
But Mac Mini people, they're in a bad spot.
Marco:
Mac Mini people, we're complaining like, oh, our computers haven't gotten updated in two or three years.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Mac Mini people, that's always their condition.
Marco:
Since the beginning of the Mac Mini, the way they treat the Mac Mini is just insulting.
Marco:
It really is insulting.
Marco:
And the last time they updated it, they took away all the best options and all the expandability.
Marco:
And it's like, oh, we have it easy compared to the Mac Mini people.
John:
I saw someone at work the other day considering idly, like, I'm thinking to get a new Mac.
John:
I can't really decide between a 5K Mac and a Mac Mini.
John:
And it dawned on me that for, you know, once again dawned on me, you have to be shown it, that regular people don't keep track of what the hell's inside all the different Macs.
John:
As far as they're concerned, it's like going to a car dealership.
John:
Well, you know, we make an SUV, we make a coupe, we make a sedan.
John:
and you don't go to think like wait does the sedan have like a steam powered engine in it and the coupe has an internal combustion engine and i'm not aware of that like as far as you said well it was really just like you know you don't want to buy an all-in-one computer and have the big expensive screen trapped inside of there which is all legitimate reasons like but what you don't understand is that the 5k iMac has a skylight cpu and the mac mini has like a core 2 duo or whatever the hell is in that thing now
John:
like you you know look on the outside it looks like you're just you know trading off like form factor and price and everything but really you should not buy that mac mini like ever just when it was new you shouldn't have bought it and now you definitely shouldn't buy it um and i don't think apple sales people are going to emphasize that in the store although they may be confused about wait you want a mac what are you sure you don't want a macbook what are you saying mini you have to call someone from the back do we have something called a mac mini oh god
John:
I mean, at least the Mac Pro is probably next to the big TV and they might have seen it.
John:
Oh, you mean that's a computer?
John:
All right.
John:
But anyway, that's the worst part of this is that regular people shouldn't have to care about this.
John:
They should have a reasonable expectation that they can go into an Apple store and sort of pick a computer based on how big they want it to be and how much they want it to cost.
John:
have some basic understanding of like, well, the more expensive ones are better and faster and fancier than less expensive ones, but not to have this massive gulf where it's like, I think I'm deciding between, do I want to have an integrated screen and an external screen?
John:
It's like, no, there are tremendous trade-offs between the 5K iMac and the Mac mini that you really need to grasp before you make this decision.
John:
It's not as if they are just equivalent, but just the boxes are separator together.
John:
And that's Apple's fault.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, you can kind of see throughout the course of Apple's history, especially recent history, there are certain products that they keep around out of spite.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
It's like certain products that they... Maybe spite's the wrong word, but certain products where...
Marco:
they kind of begrudgingly keep them around and you can tell they really don't like them.
Marco:
And it's almost like this, it's this tense relationship they seem to have with these products of just like disdain.
Marco:
And they just kind of, you know, crap out updates every so often because they have to.
Marco:
And, you know, it's the same way that like, like this, you know, Steve Jobs famously demoing the Motorola Rocker phone.
Marco:
And you could tell he just like hated this device and he was trying to put on a good face on stage, but he just hated it.
Marco:
To me, that is how Apple treats the Mac Mini and possibly maybe even the Mac Pro these days.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Time will tell on that one.
Marco:
But the Mac Mini, certainly, that is how they treated it for a long time, where they keep it updated because for whatever strategic reason or whatever, they kind of have to keep offering this computer, which solves a bunch of needs, I guess.
Marco:
uh but they they hate it so much and they never let you forget they hate it and every update they like we're gonna give a little here but then we're gonna take away this other thing and we're just gonna make you hate this until you've all you fools all stop buying it and you switch to one of our better computers like that that is honestly the feeling i get about the mac mini and i own one and even when i bought it i was mad about it and i still bought it because i needed one but it's like i i was pricing it i'm like god this thing is such a ripoff and so restricted and so it's like it's just ah it's i i
Marco:
I felt all that anger that Apple clearly has for this product that they hate and they occasionally sell.
John:
I wonder what the pressures are on the Mac mini design.
John:
Like, is it like that every year the margins have to get better?
John:
Because that like that fits the data we have kind of like that it does get more expensive and crappier.
John:
Like, relatively speaking, obviously it gets better when they, you know, with the exception of this recent quad to dual core transition.
John:
For the most part, it does get better.
John:
But, like, it seems to me that the margins get better with every new version.
John:
And it's like they've kind of given up on, hey, we need to find a way to boost the sales of the Mac Mini because the sales are probably extremely low and not really going anywhere.
John:
But they said, but every year we can boost the margins by putting slightly cheaper stuff in it and removing the optical drive and, you know, doing all the stuff that we can do to...
John:
You know, like every group has to be measured on something.
John:
I know Apple famously has just a profit and loss line for the entire company and is not measuring every individual department saying, well, Mac Mini team, what is your profit and loss for the year or whatever?
John:
But the products are changed with some kind of purpose.
John:
And increasing or at the very least maintaining margins seems to be a big Apple incentive.
John:
And when I look at what they're doing with the Mac Mini platform,
John:
What explanation for the evolution of that hardware and that product is there other than pressure to increase or maintain margins with each new revision and not a lot of pressure to do anything with it until it's in desperate need of replacement?
John:
Because...
John:
It like it has never been a great bargain, but I feel like the value proposition has just gotten worse and worse.
John:
You were getting less for more money.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And, you know, like you said, Marco, you know, if you need a tiny little headless Mac, this is your only option.
John:
And maybe that's maybe that's just good business.
John:
Maybe Apple knows, hey, if people need a tiny little headless Mac, this is their only option.
John:
So.
John:
just add like you know a little tiny bit extra every year can we add you know take out 10 or 20 bucks worth of hardware and add 50 bucks to the price and do that every three years for the next nine years and pretty soon you have an 800 computer that's as fast as a pocket calculator
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
What did you buy your Mac Mini for?
Marco:
It's my iSCSI host and it runs Backblaze to back up my Synology and it's currently doing this live stream.
Marco:
It's kind of where I put utility software that I don't want junking up my main Mac.
Marco:
So the iSCSI driver was one of those things.
Marco:
I also use it as the Fujitsu ScanSnap software machine.
Marco:
It runs the ScanSnap software.
Marco:
The ScanSnap scans to it and then it just syncs things over via network sharing to my real computer.
Marco:
So it kind of does this set of utility functions.
Marco:
It's kind of a home server in certain ways, but not always.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I'm always looking for possible plans of how I can rearrange my home setup such that I don't need it anymore.
Marco:
But it is still in use.
Casey:
The correct answer to my question was a continuous integration server, but who am I kidding?
Marco:
I know what that is, vaguely.
Marco:
This is WMD sessions about the testing bots.
Marco:
Yes, it's one of those things where when I see the session about it at WDC, it looks and sounds really cool, but it also looks and sounds like it requires a lot of setup of testing and infrastructure that I don't probably want to set up.
Marco:
So someday that will sound really awesome to me.
Marco:
Someday when I have a staff of responsible programmers working for me, they can set that up and I will just enjoy the benefits of it.
John:
We've got to start small.
John:
We're starting with unit tests.
John:
We're not going to go all the way to continuous integration server.
John:
And for a single-person shop, you probably don't need that, although Underscore probably has five of them.
John:
Continuously building his software and running tests against them, and he has a little dashboard that sends him a message on his watch that tells him the state of all his applications as of the latest beta of the software.
Marco:
And he's really good at using time, so he probably didn't set that up.
John:
No, he did, because now his applications write themselves.
Marco:
How do you think he writes all his apps?
John:
He just, you know, new betas of the OS come out.
John:
His little minions automatically download it, rebuild his software for it, click all the fix-it things in Xcode to fix all the problems that it finds.
John:
And then he has a little dashboard display on his watch while he's out for his evening constitutional that tells him how many of his apps have successfully upgraded for iOS 10 beta 2.
John:
And, you know, one of them has one warning left, and he's going to go and sit down at his computer, click one button, and he'll fix that one.
John:
Job done.
John:
It's not a picture of his life.
John:
Don't tell me if it's any different.
Casey:
No, it's accurate.
Casey:
I've seen his setup.
Casey:
It's accurate.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our sponsors this week, Eero, Wonder Capital, and Trunk Club, 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.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
John didn't do any research.
Casey:
Margo and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
John:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
So long.
Casey:
All right, so tell me about your potential new Accord, John, or the family's potential new Accord, anyway.
Marco:
I mean, it makes sense.
Marco:
Like, Mike has two iPads, right?
Marco:
I think he has 13.
Marco:
That's right.
Marco:
So, you know, you can have two Accords.
John:
Yeah, no, I don't have any problem with that.
John:
My wife's car is about 10 years old, and it's usually when we start thinking about replacing them, and it's pretty beat up.
John:
And she's thinking about what kind of car should she get, and she faces the same problems that you were talking about, Casey.
John:
She doesn't want an automatic transmission.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Um, her options are really limited.
John:
We also don't want to spend a tremendous amount of money for the car for a variety of reasons.
John:
I mean, we know what's, just look at her old car and you just think of, you're going to buy a $60,000 car and it's going to look like that for 10 years.
John:
You're going to be sad.
John:
Um, so we need, you know, it needs to be reliable, big, be able to fit four people in it and all of our stuff, all that, you know, and we basically end up back in the same place we always end up, which is like the Mazda 6 or the Honda Accord.
John:
Those are the, those are the reasonably priced, reliable four-door sporty sedans you can get with the stick shift.
John:
And she resisted that for a while, started coming around a little bit when she was looking at the new Accord, started doing like the little builder thingy to build your own car.
John:
And I think what's pushing her over the edge is the fact that they have, once again, the same thing that they had when she got her current car.
John:
Her current car, she had a, I always think the model year is wrong because I messed up with the calendar years, but a 2003 or four-ish Accord.
John:
They got totaled.
John:
and with uh we got a you know pretty good amount of money back from that basically with the money from that car being total plus a little bit extra we bought a 2006 ish accord and at that point it was the end of the generation like the end of that you know that before they replaced it with the super ugly one that i never bought and never considered buying because it was terrible that was bad yeah that was like the worst accord in a long time anyway it was the end of the generation and i guess they do this regularly i don't know this i've only been buying accords for you know 10 years or so so i don't know um
John:
they make a special edition right at the end of the product line so that for 2017 the honda accord sport comes in a special edition which is just the honda accord sport which by the way the sport is you know we get the sport because it has a stick shift you can get the stick shift in the lx but the sport has like nicer wheels and stuff but any of the cars with the six shift you can't get a lot of the nice options so a lot of the fancy stuff that's in the v6 or in the high-end ones you just can't get with a stick shift which is just shame so we're kind of like limiting ourselves but
John:
the sport special edition is still limited like the sport but has a few extra niceties so it comes with leather seats and heat uh seat heaters which she's wanted for a long time and we haven't been able to get because for the most part four-door stick shift sedans do not come with leather seats or seat heaters unless they're bmws like you know cheap cars so finally here is a car down in our price range with these fancy options in it um
John:
and it comes with the nice fancy wheels and all the little body treatments and all the other stuff that you want your accord sport to come with and contrasting red stitching and a little ball shifter thing and all sorts of uh nice things there still doesn't come with navigation you think you still can't get that um and the second thing that i think is attracting her to it is for the most part the accord sport comes in super boring colors like you can get black white and gray i think those are the only options when i bought my car that's it
John:
you know honda is not particularly magnanimous with the color choices that's not true i'm looking at red right here the sport special edition right right well so now red is an option both in 2016 red is an option and in the 2017 special edition so she wants to get a red honda cord sport special edition 2017 model these wheels are aggressive
Casey:
I like them, but they're aggressive.
John:
I know.
John:
Anyway, so this is probably the car she's going to get.
John:
And I think what is making her go over is the seat heaters and the leather, which I don't think she's going to be that big of a fan of leather.
John:
I like cloth seats personally, but seat heaters, I think she will enjoy a lot.
John:
And the fact that she's going to get it in red.
John:
So she's got, she's bitten by the Marco Redbug.
John:
She's at that stage in life where she wants to have a red car.
John:
I would never buy this car.
John:
I would buy this in black immediately.
John:
And, but she can't tolerate having two black Accords, even though I could, even though they would look as different as two of my children to me, to her, it's like looking at two Penguins and they look exactly the same.
John:
Like, so 2017 and 2014, they're totally different.
John:
The wheels alone, how can you not tell?
John:
Like, would I ever mistakenly get in the wrong car?
John:
It would never happen.
John:
But to her, she cannot have two black Accords.
John:
which is fine it's her car she can pick whatever color she wants and really her only options are white black gray and red in other words black and red is what we're gonna be getting yeah yeah i don't i don't mind that like i like the silver the gray is really dark but the silver i think accord does look good in silver but silver is not an option for this so will this be better than your car
John:
uh yeah i mean like it obviously seat heaters is going to make it better and leather technically is better but like i said i think i like cloth better um i mean it looks to me like it's better than your car in almost every way and how do you feel about that it's the same engine and transmission um and like i said i don't think the leather seats are actually an improvement especially you know i know the heaters are going to make them warm up in the winter time but it is cold initially unless you let the seats warm up before you get into the car
John:
um and i don't really like sitting on leather i'd rather sit on cloth um but everything else about it's not faster doesn't have a more powerful engine uh i'm kind of jealous of her wheels because like casey said they are more aggressive and i feel like i should have the more aggressive wheels but it'll be fine like i'm i'm happy for her to have this car if she likes it then that's all i care about um i i will continue to try to defend my car even as my children scrape their bicycles against the side of it
Casey:
Why not a Zoom Zoom?
John:
She doesn't seem that interested in that.
John:
And honestly, I am still a little bit wary of Mazda reliability.
John:
They're such a small company compared to Honda.
Casey:
Erin's car so far has been indestructible.
Casey:
I know.
John:
I know.
John:
They're good.
John:
We had a Mazda when I was a kid.
John:
They're fairly reliable.
John:
But I'm a little bit wary of that.
John:
I would still go with it if that's what she wanted.
John:
I think this Accord looks better than the 6.
Yeah.
John:
um and honestly we've just always been a honda family it seems silly to break the streak at this point um and the other practical concern is that's a good reason to pick a car brand well it seems silly to pick a different one yeah well the i mean we've been satisfied with honda like we you know it's like you stick with it's like going to the restaurant that you know you like rather than trying a different one um and the more practical reason is we like to get cars to the dealer which whatever it may be silly but again it's exchanging money for
John:
peace of mind or someone to blame or whatever.
John:
And it's a lot easier to get to Honda dealerships from our house than it is to Mazda dealerships.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
Whatever works.
Casey:
I was going to ask you something.
Casey:
Shoot.
Casey:
Oh, somebody pointed out in the chat the same thing I was thinking.
Casey:
You know, I have no issue, quite obviously, with her getting a six speed.
Casey:
But if she had gotten an automatic, I think that would let her get a remote start.
Casey:
And in the barbaric conditions in which you live, that would probably be really nice unless you would forego the garage and give her the garage spot.
John:
I saw the remote start as an option in the little car builder thing.
John:
I didn't realize it probably had to be associated with the automatic, but it's not actually an automatic.
John:
The CVT is the other option.
John:
That's the thing.
John:
The court is so like, those are your options in Honda these days.
John:
You understand why I'm being chased down into this one little corner of Honda's car lineup.
John:
And eventually like Casey, you know, I will be in a situation where this goes away.
John:
But in the meantime, I'm going to keep buying these.
John:
I really liked my car.
John:
Uh, it's, it's probably the best, uh, car I've owned.
John:
possible exception of the 1992 civic which i really like but was a death trap yeah you keep sticking with honda let me know how that works yeah minor issues yeah they're they are good cars um and this does look every car was a death trap in 1992 come on like it was a tiny little economy car we didn't have the technology to do this yeah but the accord is this generation of accord is a great i don't know what the next generation will be like of accords if you're thinking of getting accord and this is the last model year and they're going to switch it over in 2018
Casey:
get this car get a 2016 get a 2017 the whole the whole model line is just great god looking i'm building my own 2017 accord sedan sport special edition six-speed manual that that's the entire model name anyway uh you're right the exterior colors black steel which is gray uh samarino red or white white orchid uh pearl white are your options your interior color your choices are as follows
Casey:
Black leather.
Casey:
You have three choices of wheels, a bunch of really crappy exterior accessories, a handful of equally crappy interior accessories, and then electronic.
Casey:
Wait a second.
John:
As I said, electronic started on there, but I think you're right.
John:
How can that be associated with the manual?
John:
How does that even work?
John:
Can't be.
Casey:
Well, if you leave it in neutral, which is not a good idea.
John:
No, well, who does that?
John:
That's not how you park a car.
Casey:
A lot of people do that.
Casey:
I agree with you.
Casey:
It's barbaric.
John:
But if you don't do that and you hit the remote start, does your car lurch forward and slam into your garage wall?
John:
Yes, seriously.
How can that be?
Casey:
That doesn't make any sense.
John:
It's probably just their website not realizing, oh, you can't have that unless you have the CVT.
Casey:
Yeah, that's probably true.
John:
And those stupid plastic accessories that you see, the exterior accessories, people buy those.
John:
I see them on the road all the time.
John:
Like, A, look at the prices, and B, look at what they look like.
John:
Some of them, I think, actually do look kind of cool.
Casey:
Oh, the body side molding looks good.
John:
But usually people don't buy just one.
John:
They buy, like, all of them.
John:
And just look at the prices.
John:
Look at how much money they're paying.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I don't understand it.
Casey:
Anyway, I bring all this up to say that it is...
Casey:
It's frustrating, not only how cheap this car is as compared to the sorts of cars that I am often pricing, which, again, I didn't buy my BMW new for that very reason, but there are so few actual options.
Casey:
Like, these are just, how do you say it, accoutrement or whatever?
John:
Yeah, these are all dealer-installed crap.
Casey:
That's what these things are.
Casey:
Right, exactly.
Casey:
But with BMW, they nickel and dime you over everything.
Casey:
It is absurd how bad they nickel and dime you over the dumbest crap.
Casey:
In fact, I don't think you even get leather for free.
John:
Honda just added the floor mats a couple years ago, I believe.
John:
For the first half of my Honda buying, you had to pay $150 for the floor mats.
John:
They finally added that in.
John:
So that's a nice...
Marco:
break from the norm but yeah it's frustrating how few options are because again we would pay for navigation we would pay whatever obscene price for navigation because that's that's what i want she wants even though we all know it's better on the phone and all this other stuff she just wants to have a car with navigation to see what to see what it's like oh no having it built in is awesome i i will tolerate like like you know even tesla system is is okay but it's not great but i i still use it instead of using my phone because it's built in and having it built in is awesome
Casey:
Yep, I completely agree.
Casey:
And my maps are, well, I actually happen to have a BMW bill, a repair bill, because that's what BMWs do is they generate repair bills.
Casey:
I have one in front of me, which includes a delivery date, which was December of 2010.
Casey:
So I have maps from 2010.
Casey:
And every single time I get in the car when I don't know where I'm going, I will spend the time to plug it into the navigation because it is so much more convenient and safe than
Casey:
to look at the screen that's designed for that sort of thing than it is to be fumbling with my phone and i could not agree more even an ancient car like mine is becoming i would still rather have the onboard nav so tina is right to ask for it i completely agree yeah but again not an option like so much again so because this is basically the bottom of the line honda even though this is the special edition and i'm wondering what other special edition things are like
John:
her special edition had the faux carbon fiber trim like that was the special edition her wheels like the things that distinguish her current accord as special edition are from the outside is the wheels and if you look inside the fake carbon fiber that replaces like the the trim bits um and that's basically it and the people who we got such a good deal on her car the people who
John:
ordered this car before us and then backed out did add a couple of external bolt-on dealer accessories that i just had to like stomach you know like you know because you can't really remove them because now there's like holes in the body work of where they mount them or whatever so i had to just accept those i don't particularly like them i would never bought them myself but this car was so cheap we got such a good deal on this car
John:
I assume we're not going to get that great of a deal in 2017.
John:
The other 2017 thing I'm looking forward to is supposedly they made their infotainment system software better.
John:
And there's a lot of room for it to get better because it is so slow and so clunky and so Byzantine.
John:
It took me like six months to learn how to do the most basic things on it.
John:
It still drives me nuts.
John:
So I'm happy for them to have, you know, they advertise it as, you know, being more responsive.
John:
Like, please, anything.
John:
anything any improvement in that area that you can give me i will accept i'm sure they probably also made some other things worse so uh anyway i'm i'm hopeful vaguely hopeful about this car but yeah i'm slowly being chased out of uh the car market by stick shifts disappearing and i'm being chased out of hondas by honda replacing all their transmissions with uh cvts hopefully by the time i'm really chased out of it
John:
All the CVTs will have morphed into automated manual dual-clutch transmissions, and that maybe I'll be able to tolerate more than the horror that is the CVT.
Casey:
Yeah, DCT is livable.
Casey:
It's more than livable.
Casey:
If my future is not an electric car and it's not a six-speed, I will go out of my way to find a true DCT because it is not the way I would prefer it, but it is certainly livable.
Casey:
Does this model year support CarPlay?
Casey:
Because you get the big screen, even if you don't get a GPS chip, so to speak, right?
John:
But it's not a touchscreen.
John:
It's just a display screen.
Marco:
Well, CarPlay... No, no, CarPlay can use wheels and stuff, too.
John:
Right, right.
John:
But there's no... Well, there is kind of a wheel.
John:
It's not...
John:
it's not the like the uh bmw system where you have a cursor control it's not like that it's more like a series of buttons and sometimes sometimes the wheel scrolls but that's it i mean even like a d-pad kind of thing like i'm pretty sure carplay works with all sorts of combination of these of these control schemes you know intentionally honda does support carplay so maybe it works but really it's not even a d-pad it's not even a five-way thing it is literally a cluster of buttons one called menu one called back
John:
And then there's a button and then there's a wheel.
John:
And the only thing the wheel does is move the selection up and down.
John:
But you're mostly hitting menu, back, and settings to try to navigate and display it because some navigation options are not available and this particular thing is displayed.
John:
So it is a terrible interface.
Casey:
Yeah, when Marco and I and a couple of friends of ours went to Cupertino and Facebook when we were out in California, we rented a Mercedes GL45 Mercedes.
Casey:
which is a truly lovely SUV.
Casey:
Like, it's certainly not my kind of car, not the sort of thing I would want to drive, but darned if it wasn't really nice.
Casey:
That being said, I mean, iDrive has its problems.
Casey:
It's very opinionated, and it's a little bit weird, although I've come to absolutely love it, and iDrive is a BMW system.
Casey:
iDrive is great.
Casey:
Yeah, whatever they call the Mercedes system, it is...
Casey:
Unbelievably bad.
Casey:
I would assume this was like a $90,000 truck or something like that or whatever it was.
Casey:
It was expensive.
Casey:
Maybe not $90,000, but it was expensive.
Casey:
And it was beautiful in so many ways.
Casey:
But this infotainment system was awful.
Casey:
Just unbelievably bad.
Marco:
I'm guessing they probably just didn't give it a name out of mercy.
Marco:
It's called COMMAND, all caps.
Casey:
What?
Marco:
They all have names.
John:
Oh, God.
Marco:
I just I can't handle it was so unbelievably bad just indescribably bad yeah there was there was a time I about a year ago I rented I was at a car rental place for on a trip and I had to rent a four-door sedan and there was a Mercedes e something or other that was available for a little bit more I'm like okay sure I'll do that
Marco:
And it was a great pleasure to drive that car in many, many ways.
Marco:
But it had the same system.
Marco:
And my God, it's like using DOS.
Marco:
It's like, what year is this?
Marco:
And how expensive is this car?
Marco:
And you have this system in here?
Marco:
It's impressively bad.
Casey:
So if you go to automobiles.honda.com slash Accord hyphen sedan,
Casey:
And if you scroll down, how did I get here?
Casey:
Of course, you can't link to anything on the stupid page.
Casey:
If you scroll down, there's eventually a section where it says cockpit convenience or accessories.
Casey:
If you click accessories, then there's a button for Apple CarPlay where it says it is standard on EX, EXL, EXL V6 and touring models, which I assume is not the sport model, which means no guts.
John:
Yeah, it means no stick.
John:
You can get the stick in the LX, and we looked at that.
John:
You can buy a non-sport one, and you get a few different options, but you get worse-looking wheels.
John:
For me, that's the deal-breaker.
Casey:
EX, EXL, and EXL V6, and Touring.
Casey:
Those are your only options.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The LX is the bottom of the bottom of the line.
John:
They got rid of DX.
John:
That's kind of a clever thing that...
John:
uh honda did in its naming it used they used to have a like a letter system for like the trim levels right and dx was always the bottom like our our civic was the dx that's why it only had one side mirror on it like i still can't believe that was legal for a long time yeah
John:
It's a very tiny car.
John:
I think they basically retired the DX moniker because it became such a like, you know, an anti status symbol of like, oh, you got the super cheap one.
John:
Right.
John:
And so now the bottom is just like all they did was shift the letters like the LX is basically the DX.
John:
It's the same thing.
John:
Like, you know.
John:
uh no body colored side mirrors they don't do one mirror anymore but it's uh it's really cheap but yeah the sport is a step up from the lx um so even though you can get the lx uh it's frustrating because you can get the lx with a stick and you can get more options a few more options on the lx even though it is supposedly the lesser model because the sport is like oh you don't want those things you want everything just to be sporty it's like no well you know i would have taken the seat heaters in my car if they were an option but they weren't an option