I Had a Dream About the Mac Pro
Well, I think even today's PCs, they can't be that bad, can they?
They don't have Ethernet on a card.
Yeah, I remember the battle days when, like, you'd get, like, a USB card.
You're like, ooh, you've got USB, yeah, but, you know, I only take up one on my PC.
I have six PCI slots, so it's not a big deal.
Well, you would have a card for the fast, like, you'd have a USB 2.0 card with, like, two USB 2.0 slots on it, and then on your motherboard's, like, little riser thing where all the other ports were.
Yeah, the 1.1 for your keyboard and mouse.
Yeah, then you'd have the slow ports.
Plus the PS2 port, right?
Because that's probably what your keyboard and mouse can do if you had a Dell.
Yeah, you'd have two PS2 ports, and they'd be color-coded, hopefully, with the... Right, the teal one for the mouse and the lime green one for the... What was that standard called?
The standard that gave them all those ugly colors in the late 90s.
You're talking about with the PS2 port, like the mouse was purpley?
Yeah, they were color-coded.
They were like pastel.
Yeah, when they got colored, it was around 1998 or so.
There was a standard release by the PC group of whoever.
They all agreed to use these colors.
And they were ugly colors.
Oh, horrendous.
And they're still in use today.
I think the colors have not changed.
The ports have changed somewhat, but I'm pretty sure it's still the exact same colors.
PC97 introduced color code for PS2 keyboard, purple, and mouse green.
Yeah, I think that's it.
PC System Design Guide.
were there more though because like there were all sorts of there was like the sound one oh yeah here we are yeah color coding scheme pc99 perhaps the most end user visible and lasting impact of pc99 was that it introduced a color code for various standard types of plugs and connectors used on pcs sky blue is usb 3.0 super speed oh good burgundy is parallel port teal or turquoise serial port
I think the sound ones are the ugliest, like the pink, light blue, lime green.
Those are always the ugliest ones on the back of a case.
It made every PC extra ugly because no matter how tastefully you made your case, they'd put the little plastic ring around all the little audio things.
It was just like a rainbow of ugly pastel.
Oh, my God.
And then the audio plugs that would be on the end of the cables would also be those colors so you can easily line them up.
Oh, my God.
This is just a library of horrible 90s colors right here.
It was like a tasteless person's idea of solving a problem that users don't know where stuff plug into on the back of their PCs.
Let's color code them all is problem number one.
And problem number two is if we're going to color code them all, let's make them all ugly colors that all clash with each other and will never match any tasteful PC ever made.
Exactly.
PC99.
It is our 200th episode spectacular.
Before we go totally off the rails, I like to have a touchy-feely moment since I am... Well, I used to be the touchy-feely person in chief, but since Reconcilable Differences is a thing, I don't know if I am anymore.
But I do want to say...
That Reconcilable Differences is like analog, but with people who actually know what they're talking about, with all respect to Mike Hurley, whom I love.
Wait, are you suggesting, though, because you're talking about the three of us, are you suggesting that John is the touchy-feely one on that show?
John is the dark horse touchy-feely one, I'd say.
But anyway, we're getting sidetracked again in typical ATP style.
This is the 200th episode if I've ever heard it.
No, but I wanted to take a moment and genuinely from the bottom of my heart thank every single one of our listeners, past, present, future, every single one of you.
Those crazy people who go all the way back in time to listen from the beginning when they discover the show later in the run.
For the 13 of you that listened to Neutral, I'm sure that was sufficiently painful, and I apologize on behalf of all three of us.
But truly and genuinely, being a part of the show has been a tremendous highlight of my life and has afforded my family some things that we may not have been able to do otherwise.
And it's thanks to all of the listeners.
Even the ones who write us cranky emails, we appreciate you.
The ones who write us lovely emails, we really appreciate you.
And even if you listen and don't write in, we appreciate you too.
So thank you from all of us to all of you for being you and for listening to the show.
And also on a somber note, if I can't remember my Gmail password, oh, there we go.
This is going to be a short show because I can't see the damn show notes, but I just remembered it.
So we're good.
So what is it that makes somebody buy a white car exactly?
Yeah.
Oh, here we go again.
God, you're such a dick.
Anyway, it's funny, looking back on that very first episode of Neutral, had I known that that was going to be the first released episode, I probably would have started with a better phrase.
My introductory phrase to the world would have been something better than... What is it that makes somebody buy a white car?
Oh, you're a dick.
That seems about right.
What are you complaining about?
That's like... Oh, man.
I mean, are we really that different now?
No, but I would have... Had I...
had i known better at the time i would have chosen a better introductory phrase because if you if you think about i mean that was my very first appearance on any podcast ever and my my first appearance was was getting grumpy at you which again maybe is fitting in retrospect now we just sound better but it's the same we're the same people doing basically the same show now just we sound better and the car stuff tends to wait till the end of the show yeah that is accurate but uh but uh
It is wild to me to think.
And actually, I was just talking to a friend of mine at work at lunch today.
You know, he was reflecting on the time when the two of us were jackals in the 5x5 chat room.
And here it is.
I'm talking with you guys every single week, which is crazy.
It's bananas.
And I'm very thankful for it.
And again, I'm thankful for all our listeners.
And this touchy-feeling moment is going to end in a moment, but it is important to me anyway, and I think I speak for the other two guys.
It's important to all of us that you guys know that we appreciate you despite the fish that we play before the live stream every week.
Okay.
We all like you, even John.
Especially the people who go back and listen from the beginning because those are the best people.
Not that it's a competition.
Because there's so much important continuity that you'll be missing out on if you don't do that.
And it's becoming increasingly hard to do that as time passes.
So better hurry up and go through that back catalog.
Those people are the best.
That's the thing.
I mean, because these aren't 200 short shows.
No.
Well, the first like five were.
Wasn't the first episode like 15 minutes or something like that?
Yeah, because it was like the after show of Neutral that we just recorded one night and threw up on SoundCloud.
It was an inversion.
The after show became the show and the show became the after show.
Oh, man.
But I mean, to think that it was, you know, what was it?
Something like March of 2013 that we formally announced that this was a thing.
And here it is.
It's December of 2016.
And with the exception of the one crossover episode, all three of us have been on every single episode for 200 episodes every single week without fail.
And in the grand scheme of things, it's not a difficult thing to talk to your buddies at home in front of your own computer for a couple hours each week.
But you'd be surprised how challenging it can become, especially with holiday schedules as we're coming into it.
So I appreciate the two of you guys sticking with me, and I appreciate all the listeners sticking with us.
And with that touchy-feely moment done, unless you guys have something to add, we can go on to a normal, completely accidental show.
Well, Marco, we'll insert some kind of celebratory 200-episode sound at this point in the podcast.
No pressure.
We could just make this a clip show.
Just all the wonderful clips from times past.
It is the holiday season.
Ah!
Next up, let's talk about file systems.
All right.
That's more work than doing a regular show, though.
Yeah, it actually is.
It really honestly is.
I mean, if I could just sit here and bullshit with you guys for a couple hours, that's way easier than actually going back and pulling clips.
I just 19 Safari windows.
Oh, my God.
How many Chrome windows do I have open?
Oh, gosh.
Oh, my God.
I didn't even think about that.
Of course there's multiple browsers.
Of course.
12 Chrome windows.
Oh, my God.
In addition to the 19th Safari.
Yeah, I run Safari and Chrome all the time.
Oh, my God.
Why?
Why on God's green earth do you need more than 30 web browser windows open?
Why is that necessary?
How many freaking tabs are in all 30 of these web browsers?
I can close some now.
I can close the thing I'm making web browsers secure.
I can close like four of them.
I can close the pages with the dates of the super clock dates in it.
What's the average number of tabs per window, you think?
So you can still see the titles, like usually, you know.
So like eight?
No, that's too many.
One, two, three, four, like five or six.
Like, for example, when I was looking up, I wanted to look up the dates for SuperClock.
I had one window dedicated to looking up the date that SuperClock was released.
One window looking up the date that System 7.5 was released.
And within those windows, I have the Google thing.
And then I have tabs for the Google search results that I thought would be likely.
And then one of the tabs eventually led to the answer.
That window is done.
Off to the side.
Next window.
Wait, stop.
Why is it off to the side?
And why is it not closed?
So I could refer to it when I just discussed this and did the math in my head about what the dates were.
Oh, my God.
so uh let's do some follow-up as as we always should and john why don't you tell us about an lg 4k hdr monitor fun back when i was buying the new monitor for my new playstation uh i was lamenting the fact that it didn't seem to be any place uh you could buy a 4k uh
monitor with hdr support you could buy 4k televisions with hdr but not monitors not like reasonable size small things you'd put on a desk and lg just pre-announced slash announced that they're going to have a 4k 32 ish or something inch hdr capable monitor that they'll be showing at ces or something uh so you know you're welcome all i had to do was buy a monitor and then you know they announced hey can you buy a new mac pro john oh god
No, I haven't pulled that trigger yet, although I had a dream about the Mac Pro last night, speaking of the Mac Pro.
Of course you did.
I wish I should have written it down or told it to an ancient bird, Merlin style, because it's fading from memory.
So Apple had introduced a new Mac Pro.
From the front, it looked kind of like the trash can Mac Pro.
uh the name of it didn't make any sense to me in the dream it didn't make any sense and i kept asking anybody everybody who would listen in the dream why is it called this and i believe the name was something like it was like a browsing computer like web browsing like why are you calling it a browsing computer this doesn't make any sense this is supposed to be the new mac pro the replacement of the macro what does that have to do with web browsing anyway that's what it was called and when you rotate it around the back of it instead of it looking like the current one on the back of the the trash can cylinder was a section that was just cut out flat
and what it looked like you know what the flattened place looked like it was like the back of an old pc you know with the the pci slots with the little covers on them you know the little sort of unfinished steel that's what it looked like on the back just steel like a big flat section that was steel and had like the graphics card with a little port picking out of it and then two pci slots which didn't make any sense because it's a cylinder in there anyway that's what it looked like it was gross i wasn't happy with it and it was named after something having to do with browsing which didn't make any sense
see normally i cannot stand to hear about someone else's brain taking a dump in their dreams like i just i cannot stand dream recollections because they make no sense i tried to make it concise like there was way more to it but i had the highlights but but i will you know for whatever reason i i will tolerate dream recollections about the mac pro because i'm just that desperate for anything about the mac pro yeah
You wouldn't want this one.
I'm still having flashbacks of the back of this thing, like the back of a PC shoved into the back of a trash can.
And there was some crap about, oh, I guess the old back with the little light-up things and everything.
And the ports being on the little curve, that was just too expensive.
So they're just going with the back of a PC XT case.
But you know that I would still buy it and you would still not buy it.
I don't know.
Who knows what I'll do in the future?
All I know is if Apple releases something that they call a Mac Pro, even if it is only slightly what John is interested in,
john if you don't buy one i'm gonna buy a friggin one for you so this way i don't have to continue to hear you lament about how you have a mac pro that's older than than my child by quite a long stretch i should add he's your mac pro is like four times older than my child it's older than both of our children combined that's true good grief all right let's move on before i have to go find a bottle of vodka and start drinking
I wasn't planning on this being a holiday spectacular.
The headphone port slash jack audio source bugs.
I think it was Marco that talked about this an episode or two ago.
And the way it was pitched, given the information we had at our disposal at the time, was that it was perhaps something with the lightning headphones.
Oh, no, I'm sorry.
It was John that brought this up, wasn't it?
Regardless, when you plug in lightning headphones, sometimes the audio doesn't go to the headphones.
When you unplug them, sometimes weird things happen.
And I guess we've gotten word that this may be an iOS 10 thing and not necessarily a lightning headphones thing.
So do either of you want to build on that?
Well, that was the feedback that started coming in because my report was like, look, I got this new iPhone 7 and this new thing is happening to me and I'm going to blame it on the new headphone thing because it never happened with my old headphones.
And the first set of reports I got were people saying, hey, I've got an older iPhone that has a plain old headphone jack and it's happening to me, too.
So I guess it must be iOS 10 related, not hardware related.
And then eventually more reports started coming and saying, nope, happens on iOS 9, too.
So I'm going to say that I was just lucky up to this point that I had never run into this bug.
And I just happened to see it coinciding with my lightning headphones because so many people have said they've seen this on iOS 9 and with plain old headphones.
So, oh, well.
All right.
Fair enough.
So we also spoke about my Safari back and forward swipe issue and brief recap.
Occasionally, and this used to happen constantly years ago, I would use on my magic mouse or perhaps on the trackpad on my laptops.
I would do on the Magic Mouse a one-finger swipe on the laptop, so it's a two-finger swipe, and I would attempt to go, say, back or forward a page, and the page would start to animate, say, back, so from left to right, and then it would get stuck, and Safari would be effectively locked.
And I thought that I was just a unicorn in the bad way, and that I was one of the few people this happened to.
I got a lot of people.
I can't put a number on it, but...
More than I expected, people tweeting at me saying, oh, my God, I thought I was the only one.
It turns out there's more of us than just me.
A lot of people have said that they had this problem.
And we did get a handful of people that said, and I haven't had a chance to try this myself, that when Safari freezes when swiping back, you need to restore the page to the original position by swiping the other direction, and then Safari will continue working.
You don't have to quit Safari or reboot or whatever the case may be.
I, again, haven't corroborated that myself, but I saw that mentioned a couple of different times.
So it's worth trying if you're one of those sad unicorns like I am.
Moving on.
Andrew Bucky writes in to say, I'm a controls engineer working primarily in automotive powertrain, and I am based in the Detroit area.
Just for your info, the machine in the video that we mentioned last week is usually referred to as a mill turn, as it can do milling, straight cuts and drilling done by a mill, and turning, which is done by a lathe.
And the important piece here is that we were talking about how this is a very fancy crankshaft and how wild that is.
He said cranks are not usually produced like this.
That was either a prototype part or a crank for a race car engine or quote unquote hypercar.
Usually the crank is cast in the rough shape of the crank and only a few millimeters of material needs to be removed.
Some surfaces are not even touched by the cutter in most every case except low-volume parts.
The machining process is progressive, with the part passing through around 10 different mil-turn lathes, a balancer, a polisher, and a high-pressure washer, which is 5,000 PSI water for deburring and cleaning before a finished part pops out.
So this is not a normal procedure, but man, was it cool to watch.
Yeah, that makes sense because you're saying like if this is how this is what it takes to make every crankshaft, this seems this seems excessive.
Seems like not not a mass producing and not a process by which you'd make a lot of anything because it just looks so I mean, you know, you're only making one of those things at a time and the machine is the size of a truck.
And so it just doesn't work out as a mass production type of thing.
um jake rob also uh added something to that and he says i don't know of a single production car with a billet crank that's you know these are these are a machine from a steel billet so they'll call it billet crank ferrari mclaren konesteg all use forge to bill it is for custom race engines so it's not even even hypercars don't use it it's like only if you are making an engine for an actual custom racing car like for f1 or something like that are you going to do this if you're making a hypercar to sell the consumers even that doesn't give you enough money to occupy a gigantic truck size
computer controlled milling machine for god knows how long it takes to make one of those things indeed uh we also had a conversation via email with an anonymous amazon employee who has tried amazon go and this email chain i wish i could publish it because it was fascinating and i'm not being silly i'm being genuine i thought it was really really interesting and so
This particular individual, they said that they were on the queue to get in the beta but weren't there yet.
And then just like the next day, they said, oh, my goodness, I'm in the beta.
And then the following day, they said, OK, I've been and here's the situation.
And so to quote them, I just got back from my first visit.
No RFID, no slanted shelves to push product up front, no clear weight pads on the shelves, though all shelves are set up to be connected to a network.
So it's possible the entire shelf is being weighed and not a single aisle.
They got their receipt about five minutes after they left, so no door clustering.
It had everything I grabbed, including the Starbucks I pulled from the back of the stack.
I thought of you, John, said our anonymous writer.
The entire ceiling is an array of wireless sensors and cameras.
I think they may be taking full radar of the store to track people and product.
How freaking cool is that?
I would love to see this in person.
Waiting five minutes for your receipt is like, they just have, are the servers just slow or is it always going to be five minutes?
Yeah, that does stop people from clustering, but it also stops you if you got accidentally charged for 99 bottles of something you bought one bottle of.
Finding that out five minutes later, you could be driving away and now you have to circle back.
So that's kind of crappy.
Well, no, because maybe this was a private email just to me because I exchanged a couple with this individual.
But they said that if you look at the special app that you have to put on your phone in order to use Amazon Go, once you get your receipt, you can just do a delete swipe, you know, so that's a right to left swipe, and it will immediately remove that charge or refund you that item or whatever the case may be.
I'm assuming since it's all Amazon employees right now, it's kind of honor system, I guess, but...
Yeah, or just leave the store and then just delete, swipe everything you just bought.
This is a great system.
Right.
But, I mean, according to this individual, it was very accurate, and there was no obvious witchcraft about it other than the ceiling array of sensors.
So very cool stuff.
I'm really curious to see if this goes anywhere, but very neat.
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was it yesterday as we record we're recording on wednesday the 14th i think it was yesterday or maybe this morning sometime it's been a blur for me at work lately uh apple finally allowed us to give them 180 of our money and order airpods right at the end of the year by an hour after it went on sale the date had slipped to after christmas and within just a couple hours after that
The date had slipped to well after Christmas and well into the new year.
I haven't looked lately at what the date is.
I would just like to say a personal thank you to Apple that they decided to do this based on the one true time zone, which is Eastern time.
And that makes me extremely happy because those those jerks make us stay up till three in the morning or wake up at three in the morning to order our darn iPhones.
And it was lovely.
Well, it would have been lovely had I ordered some to be able to just casually say, yes, I'd like one of these, please.
I've been awake for an hour or two and I am prepared to make this kind of decision.
Meanwhile, I should add, a certain little someone whose name might rhyme with smell is sending me a picture of him listening to our show in AirPods right now, that big jerk.
So hi, Mason Smell.
It's good to see that you're listening on your fancy pets at AirPods.
You can take solace in the fact that his right ear hurts.
Did either of you guys order a pair?
Marco, I know you did, so I guess I shouldn't ask you.
John, did you order a pair?
I did.
I was excited.
Really?
I was.
I also I'm glad they did it in the right time zone because I was awake and near a computer at the time.
Everyone said AirPods are available.
And so people said AirPods are available.
And I went click, click, click, click, click order.
And mine are supposed to be delivered on the 21st.
Yep.
Same deal.
Same with me.
I'm looking forward to how much they're going to hurt my ears.
But I really hope they don't.
No, honestly, like all of Apple's earbuds and all earbuds have always hurt my ears enough that I really can't ever use them.
I'm hoping these will be different because the immense convenience of them is, you know,
I don't care how crappy they sound.
If they're comfortable at all, I want to wear them on a regular basis to listen to podcasts while on the go.
That will be awesome.
And it'll be extra awesome to just like, you know, their case is so small that you can bring them like in a, you know, like all earbuds people have always known forever.
You can bring them like in a pocket or a bag that would otherwise be too small for most other kinds of headphones.
So you can kind of always have them with you.
And that's something that I have wished for since I started carrying portable music devices, basically, to just always have it with you so that if you find yourself in a situation where you need it or where you'd like to listen to something, you can just take your headphones out of your pocket and listen.
And I've never had headphones that small before because they don't fit my ears.
But I'm going to really try to make these work because I really want that convenience for everyday walking around.
Why don't you try whittling them down or something?
You have like a carving knife?
He carved it himself from a bigger ear pod.
The other thing too, as I have used my iPhone 7 more without its real headphone jack, basically the more I live with the iPhone 7, the less I ever want to use wired headphones with it again.
It's not that you can't do it.
We know we can do it with the $9 dongle.
But it is such a clunky experience and such a limiting experience.
Like if you want to charge your phone on a plane, I really do not intend to ever buy another pair of wired headphones that isn't intended for my desk ever again.
So how amazing would it be?
Like this is Casey's fantasy tonight is Marco gets a set of AirPods, puts them in his ears and realizes, hmm.
You know, these don't hurt my ears.
Maybe this earbud thing ain't so bad.
And in typical Marco style, fast forward two months.
You know what, Casey?
Have you ever heard of getting your ears poured and getting, like, in-ear monitors?
These things are amazing!
But that's not the same thing.
Earpods are not the same as...
Oh, no, no, I know.
You know, setty eel going into your ear canal.
These are outside, you know.
I think there's a long distance to go from can Margo's weird-shaped ears tolerate plain old ear buds, which is what I would call these things, to can I get some crap shoved right up in my ear?
That's a whole different thing.
Well, also, in-ear monitors, I respect them as a category.
I've never been able to wear them myself.
I've tried.
I've tried a couple, and I got the fancy comply tips and all those things, and yeah, none of them really ever worked for me.
But they also are very different in the way they function.
I mean, first of all...
There are very few, if any, wireless ones.
And as I said, I'm right now for my needs away from my desk.
I'm only interested in wireless from this point forward.
And the other problem is that they isolate really, really well.
They really block out all outside sound.
And most of the time when I'm using my portable headphones, that's actually not what I want.
If I'm walking around my town, walking my dog or walking from the city or if I'm walking through an airport alone, I will use these headphones in all those times where I really don't want that much isolation from the outside world.
So in-ear monitors are great for lots of people and use cases that I don't have.
No, that's fair.
In case, listeners, you weren't aware, I've been beating Marco up for probably a year or two now that my dad has a set of custom in-ear monitors that he had had done a couple of years back where you go to some sort of special ear doctor.
I'm sure there's a term for it.
Audiologist.
Oh, yeah, or an audiologist or whatever the case may be.
And you get a mold made of your ear canal, and then you send that mold to a company that will make a set of ear phones, I guess they would be called.
That is molded for your ear specifically.
And I keep saying to Marco, oh my God, imagine how amazing it would be to have a speaker or a series of speakers millimeters away from your eardrums or whatever the receptacle is that you need to listen to things.
And every time Marco has said, yes, but anything that goes in my ears is evil and doesn't work.
And so that is the source of my fantasy is what if this was the way to get Marco to try in-ear monitors and realize that this headphone business is just a bunch of waste.
It's a total waste of time.
We'll see.
Time will tell, listeners.
Time will tell.
Anyway, in any case, I am actually hopeful that I will at some point receive a set of AirPods.
I didn't buy them only because I don't have an urgent need for them.
I mean, the holidays are coming up, but I don't expect to receive them for the holidays.
I was going to say, did you not order them yourself, but did you casually send the URL to Aaron or something?
No, no, no.
I thought about it, but I didn't.
Not a good plan for something like that.
Yeah, probably not.
Plus, Aaron has been going on and on about how this is going to be a great Christmas and Hanukkah for me.
And I got to tell you the truth.
I did not do as well for her this year, so I'm already feeling pretty guilty.
But anyway.
Way to set expectations.
Yeah, right.
So in any case, I figure my birthday is in March, so maybe I'll get a set pair or whatever for my birthday.
Yeah.
But I definitely want to try them.
I am super intrigued by them.
I think they look really, really awesome.
And I think it's a very Apple-y way.
This, to me, is the Apple that the three of us love.
And I hope this doesn't take a negative turn.
But this is Apple taking a thing that was annoying, but we all... Well, most of us lived with.
Traditional Bluetooth, I am a proponent and defender of it.
But I cannot sit here and say it's perfect and it's flawless.
It's sufficient.
And for me, the trade-offs are worth it.
But this...
This W1 chip and all the fancy Bluetooth stuff that they're doing, this just looks awesome and is solving a problem in the most aptly best possible way.
And I'm really looking forward to at least trying AirPods at some point, if not getting my own set.
And I agree with you, Marco, that as much as I'm giving you a hard time, in-ear monitors are not the right answer for walking around or anything like that.
um i had uh sent to me a set of bone conducting headphones uh i will put a link in the show notes for the life of me i can't remember the the name of them and i apologize because um it's it's right on the tip of my tongue but anyway we'll put a link in the show notes yeah i've actually i know you're talking about i've actually been meaning to try those myself but uh haven't quite gotten to it yet
Yeah, well, if you remind me, we're going to see each other in a few weeks and I'll bring them.
They are not the greatest for music.
It's a bit tinny, which makes sense because if you're not familiar with bone conducting headphones, the way it works is there's nothing over your ear itself.
They go kind of around your ears.
I guess it's your cheekbones that are the bones that kind of stick out where your cheeks are.
Well, anyways, so they vibrate your cheekbones, which kind of somehow vibrates the inner ear.
That sounds really scary and sketchy, but actually it works really well.
And my word, for listening to podcasts, I should say, they are phenomenal.
Phenomenal.
And what's great about it is you can have them in and still be completely and totally aware of what's going on around you.
The Aftershocks Trex Titanium is the name of the headphones.
I'll put a link in the show notes.
If all you're doing is listening to podcasts, I cannot recommend these enough.
And I think that the AirPods are going to fill a similar gap in
Except they'll probably be far better for music.
Now, they'll probably have a little more isolation, which is both good and bad, but they'll probably be far better for music.
So I'm really anxious to try AirPods.
Hopefully you guys will bring a set and I'll bring some like disinfecting wipes or something.
So after I try them, I can disinfect them.
But I would love to try them when we see each other in a few weeks.
I am super amped to see how these are and see what the real world says once they're out in the wild.
Yeah.
The one concern I have, and I'm remembering now why I didn't rush to order the bone conduction ones, the main issue I have with so many Bluetooth headphones is a lack of easy or good or any controls for volume, seek back, seek forward, play pause.
Regularly with the wired ones, you have the clicker, and the clicker is its own set of challenges of the various multi-click gestures.
Doing those reliably is always a little bit tricky and everything.
Uh, but the reason I've stuck with my ugly Sennheiser PX210BT for so long is because it has just these big plastic buttons on the right ear cup.
And like right now it's getting cold outside.
So on a lot of my walks now I'm wearing gloves and I can, I can feel and accurately push these giant plastic buttons through gloves even.
And it's, you know, one click for back, one click for forward, you know, click up, up and down for volume, middle for pause.
Like it's so convenient.
And almost every good Bluetooth headphone does not have good controls.
Like almost all the other ones, the ones that are on ear or over ear, they get all fancy with like touch gestures.
And those are all, believe me, I've tried so many.
They are all awful.
they're just the worst like it's like oh make a little swirl motion with your hand to turn the volume up yeah that works really precisely like it's just oh my god and there's delay and you got to tap again and oh it's they're they're so unreliable they're so annoying um that's always a challenge with bluetooth headphones and you know you got to figure it's kind of a physical design problem like where do you put the controls on some of these and the airpods from the from you know what we know so far
They only have one control gesture, which is it's either a tap or double tap.
I forget.
Do you remember which one?
But anyway, whatever it is, it's by default, it toggles Siri and you can apparently change it in the preferences to instead be a play pause button.
But that's it.
And so I do worry about that.
And I worry about that, as I said, with all Bluetooth headphones, because most of them have either bad to no controls.
So that, I think, is going to be frustrating to only have play-pause control.
Or, you know, you can ask Siri to play and pause your stuff, but I don't think that would be good for me to remain positive about Apple stuff.
So I think I'm not going to configure mine that way.
but uh you know i i assume the the assumption i guess the the design assumption here is that maybe you'll want to control things either all through siri which is probably not great um or through the apple watch or through your phone by taking out of your pocket and everything and those are all okay answers none of them are as good as having actual physical controls that are near or on the headphones uh but we'll see how that works in practice i i think the airpods overall will be so incredibly convenient and
that will probably be willing to overlook the annoyance of the lack of physical controls on them, even though that will be a big annoyance.
But I think the convenience will just be so great that we'll overlook that.
They just need another wireless dongle to be the controller, right?
So you got the ear... I mean, as far as I'm concerned, it's not... You mean like an Apple Watch?
I would probably take that.
In fact, I did wear my Apple Watch recently just to... Congratulations.
Give it a... Watches still annoy me.
But yeah, like, I just don't want the wire connecting because that gets caught on things and it's annoying.
So if... And also, like...
reaching into my pocket to try to find the volume on my phone i can probably pull that off but i don't think there's any hardware button i can hit on my phone that will advance or go back right funny thing i actually i prototyped a while ago with overcast i i use the accelerometer on the phone during playback to try to detect if you would just tap the phone in your pocket like if you just hit the back foot with your finger and try to interpret tap gestures the same way you do it on a remote clicker
And I almost got it working.
You can actually do it, and it works okay, but it doesn't work reliably enough.
I get it to be good for maybe two-thirds of the time, but that's nowhere close to how reliable it has to be to make it actually usable without wanting to throw your phone out the window.
But...
i actually i wanted to solve this exact problem like just i want a remote control in my pocket and just go tap tap you know or whatever it is just tapping the back of your the back of your phone in your pocket like as you're walking and you don't want to tap something i want i want buttons i want buttons that i can feel buttons you could feel with gloves on even but you can tap it with gloves on too it doesn't matter no tapping tapping is not not a not the way to plus it but your app would have to be front most right no if it's playing audio i can get it can be continuous all right well anyway i don't want to tap anything
I'm going to buy anything bought, sold.
I'm going to manufacture anything sold or processed.
That's the second one you guys missed today.
Well, I get that that is a reference.
I forget what it's a reference from.
It's always on Back to Work.
That's all I know.
It's a movie you haven't seen.
That's what it's a reference to.
Like so many things in life.
Well, that's every movie.
Right.
Real-time follow-up from Mason Smell.
It is double tap, and you can choose to either have that engage Siri, play pause, or do nothing at all.
Also, Mason Smell would like to tell John Syracuse that it was say anything that you were referencing.
I know Jason knows.
Or you can have it do nothing at all.
It's a great option.
Excuse me, excuse me.
It's Mason that we're speaking with.
Thank you very much.
I'm impressed that you're keeping this straight.
I'm trying real hard.
You have no idea.
In any case, so yeah, so in summary, we're all amped for our new ear pods, whatever we're calling them, headphones things.
You can't keep that straight.
Before I move on from AirPods, if Apple sold Apple Care Plus for AirPods for like $30 to $50, would you buy it?
would it cover well cover like if you lose one of them or if it falls and you step on it or whatever like instead of having to buy a whole because i'm assuming your only option now say one of them falls out of your ears or you get knocked down and you step on it and it breaks is your only option 160 out of pocket to buy an entire new set you can't just buy one right so the apple care thing would be like 30 to 50 bucks where you get you know if you if you damage them or lose them in any way you get a replacement for another 50 or some crap like that would you buy that
I don't think I would, but I'm cheap as hell.
What I'm trying to gauge is like, do you predict that you're going to have problems either losing or breaking these things?
I don't think so.
Marco?
My policy with buying extended warranties most of the time is to not buy them.
And then if in my life I end up having to pay out of pocket for so many repairs that it would have been more expensive than buying all these things up to that point, then I will start buying the extended warranties from that point forward.
your policy is close the door barn door after the horse is gone no but it's my policy is basically like let me let me take the risk and see if in my life i need to pay this kind of insurance premium or not and so far in my life you know in my entire adult life of owning expensive gadgets i have almost never bought the extended warranty and have also almost never needed one so i'm coming out way ahead basically
Have you thought about insuring your watches for either theft or damage?
I'm genuinely asking.
I'm not trying to be snarky.
No, I have.
I mean, it's smart.
When you have homeowner's insurance, that's a different thing.
And so, yeah, we have our jewelry items covered under the homeowner's insurance, specifically under a rider for them.
But that's very different and way cheaper than $350 for every laptop I buy.
Sure, sure.
Is it $350 for laptops?
I think for the 15-inch.
I think it's $300 or $350.
I'm glad I don't buy laptops.
With Apple, the price of the warranty does not take into account the price of the options when you buy it.
The warranty for the base model Mac Pro, that's $3,000, is the exact same price as if you spec it all up and make it $9,000.
The
So for my iMac, I actually did buy the extended warranty because my iMac was something like a $4,400 configuration.
It's like as much as you could put into an iMac when I bought it two years ago.
And it was priced at something like $200 for the extended warranty.
So I did buy it for that, figuring like this is a large thing with everything inside.
And this is really a very small percentage of the cost based on the cost of the whole item.
And so I figured the risk-reward ratio there was different.
But on almost everything else, I don't get it because almost everything else doesn't make any sense.
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marco had an experience today or recently anyway would you like to tell us about that oh i went to a microsoft store i'm so sorry i mean really how was it so yeah i was in the mall recently i had some time to kill while while my wife and kid but did something else so uh i went to the microsoft store and amazingly there was nobody there really it's usually so crowded
So I got to play with the big Surface Studio they had on display.
So snark aside, I'm genuinely interested to hear how you thought of this, because at a glance, this thing does look pretty damn cool.
And we talked about this a few episodes ago.
I'm curious.
So did you did you play with the tilt?
Did you play with the little dongley thing?
Tell us all about it.
So I did.
I played with everything.
So first of all, the base is way too light.
The base of it... Interesting.
They use laptop components.
People accuse the iMac of being laptop components, but the iMac is kind of a combination of desktop and laptop components.
Mostly desktop parts, really.
The Surface Studio is really laptop components.
And the base of it is very small and light.
It's a lot smaller than you'd think.
And kind of unnecessarily so.
Like...
One of the issues I had with it was while tilting it, it would kind of wobble sometimes because the screen is so much heavier than the bass that it kind of... I don't know.
I don't know why they had to make the bass so tight and so tiny and take all the trade-offs of lower power components to do that.
I think that was probably a mistake, but oh well.
Well, I think part of their advertising pitch is that it's supposed to be easy to move around.
Like it's not supposed to feel like it is rooted in whatever place it is, because as you can imagine, having it set up when it's vertical, like a screen, it would be positioned differently than when it's the other way.
So I think I think they actually have like a lazy Susan on the bottom type of thing so it can rotate.
And I think it's supposed to be light enough that you don't feel like it is anchored to the desk at the place where it's put.
That's fair.
Okay.
And it does feel light.
You move it around freely and it really does feel light.
It feels like a giant tablet.
It does not feel like a desktop computer.
So I got to play with whatever they call their stylus and whatever they call the big knob.
The Surface Dial, and I'm not sure what the pen is called, but the Surface Dial is the knob.
Cool.
So I got to play with the big knob.
Well, I got to feel the big knob.
However... Not improving.
None of the apps that I tried, which was like something I already forgot what it was, and then I spent a lot of time in Lightroom, and Lightroom did not support the big knob, so I did not get to...
get to use it for anything really uh so i put the big knob down and i just play with the stylus and uh and using the end and the touch screen and this is the first time i've i think ever played with a touch screen windows piece oh no no i i played with the windows 8 one back in the day anyway um so i have very little experience with touch screen windows pcs uh and i never use like a mod book or anything so i've never tried on a mac os either but
I do have a lot of experience in Lightroom.
And so I figured, let me try Lightroom.
It's a program I already know how to use.
Let me see how it works on this thing.
I've got to say, I really liked it.
And there are things that I didn't like about it.
But overall, it was surprisingly good.
Even using touch control in a desktop OS, which everyone says is a terrible thing...
Honestly, I suggest you try it.
Again, I'm not entirely sure I'd want to do it full-time, but to have the option, it was kind of cool to be able to control Lightroom, this program I already know how to use pretty well, and to be able to do things like
When you're using a touchscreen, you effectively have multiple pointing devices simultaneously.
So when you're sitting here on a desktop using a mouse, you're controlling one mouse cursor.
And even if you get all fancy like I do and you have a trackpad on the left and a mouse on the right, you have two pointing devices, you're still only controlling one mouse pointer and there's only one thing at a time that can have that mouse pointer.
You can only point to one thing at a time.
You can only click on one thing at a time.
when you have a touch screen, even in the setup environment, you effectively have like multiple input points at any given time.
You can use your different fingers and different hands.
So, it actually was really easy to work in Lightroom very quickly on this thing.
And...
i i can see like it would have been a lot better if it was designed for it and i guess this is the case for just big ipads uh because they are designed for it right from the start but it was pretty cool like and of course like you know i i leaned the whole thing down like i did like the the almost flat on the desk screen arrangement to do most of this i wasn't it wasn't up if it's up if it's straight up vertical then touching it makes no sense i agree with that
But when it's kind of like drafting table angle, it actually worked surprisingly well.
And I still really didn't like any part of Windows at all.
And I wasn't confused by it really.
Like, you know, I've used Windows long enough.
I have a rough idea of the Windows vocabulary of how to do things because most of it's still the same from how it was back when I was a Windows expert.
So the core of it is still the same.
And so most of Windows I still don't like.
However, if you were buying a computer whose main purpose was to be like a creative workstation to run a particular app like Lightroom or Photoshop or like a video editor...
If that app runs on Windows without any kind of massive downsides, this could be a really compelling option.
Because Microsoft is positioning it that way, they're positioning this as a creative thing you put in a studio where you're basically buying a workstation for the purpose of running one or two creative apps as your main thing, as your main role for that computer.
this is actually pretty compelling.
I can really see, like... Basically, if what you're doing doesn't really... If it doesn't really matter that it's running on Windows, like if it's one of the Adobe apps, it's kind of cool.
And I did have issues with, like...
Lightroom has a lot of very tiny interface elements, little tiny sliders and everything.
And they were a little hard to hit with the pen sometimes.
But it wouldn't take a lot of adjustment if Adobe really wanted to put any effort into this to make that really awesome.
Also, Windows... I don't know what the deal is with Windows high DPI mode.
I know it's a mess.
But basically, with Apple, you just 2x'd everything with Retina and...
Everything kind of just worked, and developers had to do a little bit of work, but not much, and it was great.
With Windows, I guess they have their high DPI modes where they can scale to any number of pixels, and they kind of scale some interface elements, but not all of them.
And so I had ridiculously tiny little text and tiny little checkboxes in the middle of giant blown-up interfaces.
It was very strange.
Yep.
So obviously...
I tried to run my VM that I was working in a few weeks ago.
I tried to run that in high DPI mode and it was really, really bad.
Like some things were tiny.
Like you said, some things were the size I expected them to be.
The fonts were just not built for high DPI.
Like it was just a really crummy experience as compared to the Mac where I'm not trying to be funny, but everything really does just work.
The Mac was going to be the way you describe Windows as for a long time.
I think I remember it was WWC 2007-ish where they were saying, come 2008, resolution independence, as they called it then, will be here, so prepare your apps.
And then 2008 came and went, and they didn't.
There used to be a little slider in the resolution.
You go 1x, 1.5x, 2x, 3x, and you can just move that slider around and watch every interface on your computer break, essentially.
You got pixel cracks.
You got things that are not scaling in the right size.
You got ugly crap.
It was so smart of them to just spend an extra few years to figure out how to make like that.
They weren't going to ship it in a state where somebody could configure their Mac to look this gross.
And so eventually the solution they came up with, as we all know, is it's two X or it's nothing.
And even that was hard enough to get everyone on board with.
But at least when that works, it works right and predictably.
Yeah, Apple definitely bet on the right side of history on that one.
And because Windows is very much suffering from this.
But anyway, so yeah, there's issues with Windows for sure.
And again, like I wouldn't be interested at all in this computer if I wanted to be like a general purpose computer or my main computer.
But again, if I were building a computer whose sole purpose was to be like a photo editing workstation, I would really give this serious consideration because it really was surprisingly good.
And I went in there all thinking, you know, oh, let me take a bunch of mental notes on how much everything sucks so I can be funny on the show.
But no, it actually is good.
And I wouldn't say it was terrible if it wasn't.
And here I am saying it's not terrible.
It really is.
if you can tolerate windows in general it's a really cool computer so what was the uh pen latency like did you do any like drawing in any of the drawing i know that's a lot of that is app dependent as it is in the ipad for example how notes on the ipad is like perfect and many drawing apps like i don't know like uh
procreate or paper a lot of those depending on what brush you're using are laggy but anyway that one of the complaints i heard about the surface studio is that the parallax was a little bit off like because i guess the distance between the the glass that you touch and the place where the pixels are was enough to make it feel weird and also that some people said it feels laggy in certain situations
The parallax glass gap thing is a real problem.
I didn't use it for any kind of drawing app.
I really only used it for some app I launched for two seconds that I couldn't figure out.
And then I just went to Lightroom because I knew how to use that.
So I was mainly using the pen to drag around sliders and stuff.
So for that, basically using it as a precision mouse pointer, it's great.
And in fact, I really enjoyed doing that because in the same hand that I had the pen in,
here I have all these fingers doing nothing.
And so if I wanted to like, you know, you know, do like one of the pink gestures, just like my other fingers, it mostly worked great.
And like palm recognition was great.
Distinguishing between pen and touch was great.
There was, I don't think in my, I don't know.
I probably used it for 10 minutes.
Um,
I don't think there was a single time when it misinterpreted one of my inputs.
It seemed like it was really, really quite good at that.
Latency is tough to judge because remember when the iPad Pro came out with the pencil, latency varies a lot by the application.
It really depends a lot on what you're doing in the app.
Yeah.
And so I can't really judge the Surface Studio in that way.
All I can judge is how the pen was as a mouse pointer to adjust sliders in Lightroom.
And it was great.
And it was also really nice to have like the pen slider in my right hand, you know, the pen doing a slider in my right hand and then using my left hand to pinch and zoom and pan around the photo that I was editing as I was dragging the slider.
I mean, again, like to have that kind of multiple input, you know, multitouch, having multiple pointing devices is really compelling when it's done well.
And I have never felt...
that productive on an iPad, mostly because the kind of apps I use for high-end creative needs aren't really on the iPad.
Yes, there's Lightroom on the iPad, but it's kind of crappy.
It's not really the same thing.
And also, the hardware is not quite up to speed to manage giant photos and stuff like that.
So iPads don't get this kind of use from me and from, I think, most people who are dealing with this high-end creative use right now.
But
in the future, if there is a huge iPad that's even bigger than the 12.9, now I finally get why you would want a giant iPad, even bigger than the 12.9, why you'd want a 27-inch iPad.
I finally understand that now.
It would be a desktop, and it would be fine.
I totally get it.
Overall, without drawing this out too much longer, I really just wanted to say I was blown away by how good it was.
And
I'm not going to go out and buy one because I don't really have a need in my life for a single-purpose workstation computer that's like a Lightroom station.
I don't need that.
But if I needed that, I'd probably buy one of these.
All my arguing over so many episodes and so many hours, and the thing that convinced you is going to a Microsoft store and using one and not even drawing on it.
You go into the Microsoft store.
I can't draw.
And you say, you know what I want to do?
I want to use...
the pen as a mouse cursor in lightroom an application that's not even optimized for touch but hey whatever works for you whatever works for you i guess i just wasn't convincing i guess i should have pitched it think of it this way mark imagine if using lightroom a non-touch optimized app and use the pen as a mouse now would you buy one yeah now i find that convincing
No, honestly, it's very tactile.
Until I actually did it and used it and tried, and especially because I was using an app that I already knew how to use and was already fast with, I was able to really see how much this kind of interaction can help.
Because I wasn't just trying to figure out a brand new app for the first time where I'm stumbling around going all slow and, oh, this is novel.
No, I was actually like...
you know going through things that i do in this app things i already know how to do and and workflows that i have oh i drag this then do this then do this like i could i could get it get an idea of like is this is this actually more productive is this you know is this doable what are the upsides what are the downsides and honestly i had a hard time finding downsides the only downside was windows
So you're going to make your audio editor application for Windows now for the Surface Studio.
Because imagine how awesome that would be, as I've said many times, your audio editing application on a big, giant touchscreen.
I have actually thought about, like, so I've done no work on the audio editor so far.
I have a bunch of concepts in my head, yeah, but I've done no actual coding.
So the options are totally open of where I would actually do this if I ever choose to do it.
And my main debate point in my head was, like, should I do this on the iPad or on the Mac?
And I've been leaning towards Mac, but I got to say the appeal of doing this kind of thing with multi-touch is something.
And maybe the touch bar on the Mac would be enough.
I don't know.
But I do think it is worth...
For all of us in the Mac commentosphere who have written off the idea of touch screens on the desktop, it's easy to just kind of repeat the company line or the party line of like, no, that's a bad idea.
We don't need that.
The desktop needs to remain the desktop.
Nobody needs a touch screen PC.
I think that is a bad assumption.
It is possible to do this well.
And Microsoft already almost has.
If the software ecosystem was better on Windows, it would be incredible.
It's not.
And the software ecosystem is the kind of thing that doesn't turn on a dime.
That doesn't all of a sudden become perfect in six months just because Microsoft releases one desktop that very few people will probably buy.
But...
I don't think we can say with confidence that Apple should never do something like the Surface Studio.
Interesting.
You can just say I'm right.
That's all right.
You can just shortcut this.
Hashtag John was right.
John was right again.
Go ahead.
It's fine.
Yeah.
Because that would be funny.
I was saying if Microsoft wants to send review units, my nine-year-old daughter who loves to draw would love to try out a Surface Studio.
Yes, because I'm sure so many Microsoft employees listen to this show.
Yeah, a lot of nine-year-olds have $3,000 28-inch tablet computers.
That's what I heard all the kids have these days.
The other thing is if I wanted one for my stated idea of having it be a Lightroom workstation,
I would want a more powerful computer for it.
I would much rather have that.
You?
What's the Surface Studio Pro?
Right.
I would much rather have the monitor part just be a monitor that I could plug into any PC and then buy a ridiculous Xeon workstation with 12 cores and have that be my crazy importer and processor because Lightroom is very well parallelized for a lot of its operations and would actually use that power and really needs extra speed.
So it's a little odd that they don't have a standalone option yet, but I would imagine if for some reason a lot of people buy this thing, maybe they'll go that direction and release it as a product.
And the good thing about the Windows ecosystem is that other people could basically do that, and it would probably be all right.
So what you need is a Xeon, a PC Xeon workstation that comes in a case that looks identical to one of your weird German amplifier thingamabobbers that you've already got on your desk.
So your desk wouldn't look any different.
The only difference is you just take your screen and tilt it down and whack some KVM with your toe or something.
And all of a sudden you're running off of your...
aluminum amplifier tube thing that's really a pc yeah maybe so question for you having experienced this touchscreen pc which i think it is important to note that that if it's pitched the way an imac is pitched it you said that you didn't really care for the touchscreen features that way only when it was in kind of easel mode or drafting table mode is that fair yeah
Okay, so that being said, now that you've seen a touchscreen PC and said, you know, maybe it's not so bad, does that change your opinion on the touch bar for better, for worse, or otherwise?
I still think it's way too early to say.
That's fair.
And it also very much depends on the app and what they're using the touch bar for.
You know, in my YouTube review, like, comment, subscribe, my main focus on the touch bar is...
It is not good as a row of buttons.
If I have to look at it, I have failed.
The touch bar is best as a sliding or panning surface.
And it does support multi-touch.
So you could do a pinch gesture on it, but you could also just do it on the trackpad right below.
So it's kind of like... I don't know how... Again, it depends on the app.
I don't know what makes sense to do on the touch bar versus just using the trackpad.
Yeah.
If, you know, some apps, you know, as I mentioned, it's nice to have multiple simultaneous touch input surfaces.
So one thing you could do is have your left hand on the touch bar and have your right hand on the trackpad and have that be two different inputs for, you know, things like panning a timeline versus moving the playhead, like stuff like that.
There's all sorts of stuff you could do in creative pro apps and lots of apps to make use of that.
It's way too early to tell for sure now what works and what doesn't long term.
But certainly my immediate upfront impression, my early use impression of the touch bar is if it's a row of buttons, I never use it.
But when it's used as some kind of big slider, that is nice.
So we'll see.
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So it's tomorrow, which means by the time you're listening to this today or perhaps yesterday, that Super Mario Run has been released to the App Store.
And I hope you're not getting on an airplane because you won't be able to play it because it is online only.
You must maintain a connection to the internet in order to play.
What?
What is that about?
So the theories about what that's about are...
Copy protection, you know, so everything is pirated on the app stores.
And the theory goes that it is slightly harder to pirate it when you have to also deal with a phone home feature that you have to bypass in addition to cracking the whatever, you know, to get it.
uh illegally i'm not entirely sure if i buy that i mean historically nintendo has been really not smart about copy protection in that they will do things that they think are saving them from piracy when really like the decrease in piracy is not a good match for the pain that they put regular users through like nintendo makes really bad trade-offs there historically so you can't entirely discount that theory even though practically speaking
It doesn't seem like it would do anything except to make it slightly more difficult to pirate it.
And I think there's a lot of motivation to pirate this thing because it's going to be popular.
Second one, you can't really discount, is just plain, not going to say incompetence, but like...
There is an online component to the game.
Just having it be online all the time is a simplification for development.
And it could have just been maybe they didn't think it would be a big deal and they miscalculated and it's simpler to do this way anyway.
And they will...
you know this is one of the situations where if it's not some wrong-headed misguided notion about piracy that they will update the game eventually to allow offline play maybe even if it's like six months to a year from now that they will update it when they get around to it they just didn't get around to it and they'll you know they will do a slow motion reconsideration and say yeah we messed up
um i guess what what is the third option is there is there any third explanation for online only besides uh incompetence and uh wrong-headed ideas about piracy analytics i guess i don't know dynamic content you can always do that periodically yeah i mean anyway the bottom line is it's i don't think it will affect
the game because people are going to buy it based on the brand it may affect uh how satisfied people are with the game so that when nintendo comes out with its second game they will have to emphasize the fact that you're able to run it offline uh but yeah it does it does not seem like a nintendo very often finds some way to do something silly with every one of the things that should be sort of a pure win um
um so i don't think it will affect uh the fortunes of this game just because there's so much pent-up demand for something nintendo besides pokemon and you know something mario on on ios so i think they'll sell a ton of these i think what is the price going to be 10 bucks i believe so yeah so i i think they'll do just fine with it uh but it but yeah it's pretty it's not a good idea to have this thing be online only that's just it's just gonna annoy people
Yeah, and there was a great discussion about this on Connected this week.
And one of the things that Mike was saying was pointing out... And this is a huge thing.
These kind of casual, quick-play, one-handed play games for phones are really often used for people who are commuting on a subway underground...
or who are flying on a plane.
It's very often used while traveling or commuting.
And there's going to be so many times where people would play this game, like in an everyday subway commute, where you're underground, you've got no connection, and you just can't play it.
And that's really unfortunate.
I wonder if it's going to be... Will it not launch?
Or does it want to phone home periodically and you can play it for some period of time and then eventually it will complain to you that it hasn't phoned home in a while?
I don't know what the mechanism is going to be like.
I have a hard time believing that the game won't even launch without a connection, but who knows?
It's Nintendo's first try at this and maybe they just totally messed it up by...
thinking the entire world is as connected as Japan is or something.
I don't know.
But it definitely seems like a miscalculation, especially since this is not a paid upfront game.
So it's not as if it's like, well, you've got your money.
They don't.
They want you to buy the unlock, and you're not going to buy the unlock if the first two times you try to play it, it says, sorry, can't play because you're offline.
I'm anxious to try it.
I mean, back in the day, you know, I know, Marco, that you were a Sega kind of guy, but I was a Nintendo kind of guy when I was a kid and had everything from the original NES all the way through the Nintendo 64 and then eventually a Wii.
So this is something that should appeal to me.
And so I'm anxious to try it.
But and I don't expect that this online only thing is really going to bother me much, but I do think it's a bummer.
And I'm
I would not put it past Nintendo, like you said, John, to just be silly about this decision and just not realizing that this is more harm than good.
But easy for me to say.
I have to say that Nintendo doesn't feel like they have... I was going to say mastery, but I would say they don't even have a handle...
on mobile gaming yet because all they have is you know the one game that they partnered they didn't even develop that niantic or whatever idea of the pokemon go thing which is a second cut at an idea that they've already tried once and it does take advantage of things that are uniquely mobile like the fact that you walk around with it and stuff like that so pokemon go is a pretty good job and takes advantage of some unique things but
This game itself was a little bit buggy and sketchy in the beginning.
And anyway, that wasn't Nintendo.
And this, I forget, is Nintendo doing this in-house or is this also outsourced to somebody?
But either way, this game, what it looks like, you know, it's got Nintendo's graphics, it's got Nintendo's IP.
I'm sure it will play well, but in terms of what it is, it's one of those, you know, tap the screen, Mario's running all on his own, you're tapping the screen to make him jump and stuff like that, which is fine as far as it goes.
What I find myself thinking about when I think about games that have stood out to me on iOS, I don't... You know, Super Mario Run is not in the top tier.
I think of something from a developer that really seemed to understand both, I think, the context of mobile gaming and the things that, you know, playing to its strengths, avoiding its weaknesses.
I think of things like...
you know alto's adventure which on the surface seems similar it's always not the same thing this thing just goes and you tap a button to make a thing happen it's like a single tap gaming type experience um and maybe it's because nintendo doesn't have any ip that fit with that type of thing but alto's adventure is just a so much stronger statement on understanding what's good about ios gaming or even something like uh
what is the one with ida walking around on the thing monument valley yeah monument valley that one taking the idea that one of the things that uh that mobile uh gaming has is that you're holding this little world in your hand so if you just put a mostly static screen on there like it's a little diorama and it's like a little world of ants and you're moving things around that's also different context whereas nintendo putting mario running horizontally in the 2d worlds like that's the old context like that may be okay even the real infinite runners take more advantage of mobile
that are more sort of mobile native than this like so nintendo taking its existing properties and finding a way that you can play them by putting one finger on the screen periodically that's all well and good but where is the nintendo equivalent of of alto's adventure or even you know the
the nintendo equivalent of year walk or whatever just like i feel like there are they haven't mastered the platform yet and if they're ever going to make a truly great ios game they have to start developing for it not as like a a come on for you to buy the real nintendo games which is what these currently are at this point but uh you know getting their developers to really understand this platform and producing something that will uh
last in our collective memory and be as well regarded as the best iOS games.
Yeah.
Agreed.
Fair enough.
So let's try to not take this to too negative a place, but Apple has made a curious choice with the new Sierra update for laptops for every laptop.
Um,
Apparently, the battery life meter has never been accurate.
We didn't realize this until people were dissatisfied with not reaching the claimed battery capacity or length on their brand new MacBook Pros.
But suddenly, surely it's not because of that, but suddenly it's turned out that the battery life meter is totally inaccurate and it's been removed.
So, I don't know what to make of this.
My initial inclination is, oh, we're just trying to sweep under the rug the fact that these computers don't get the battery life we said they did.
My second thought of this is...
Well, you know, battery life is just a guess, right?
I mean, we don't see on an iOS device how much time remaining we have on our battery.
We see a percentage for sure, but we don't see a time estimate.
And so I want to land in a place where this is not...
I don't know if nefarious is really the word I'm looking for, but it's the best word I can come up with, that it's not nefarious.
And I really feel like the Apple community and maybe just geeks in general tend to land on the nefarious point of view a little too easily.
But golly, I'm struggling to figure out a way where this is not just trying to sweep a different problem under the rug.
Encompassed in the word nefarious is a certain effectiveness that I think is not inherent in the solution.
In other words, a nefarious scheme to steal the jewels should end with you having the jewels.
If this is a nefarious scheme to address concerns about battery life, it is not particularly nefarious because it's not...
PR-wise, I'm just going to say, for all of 2016, let's just say Apple has not covered itself in glory in terms of product introductions and everything, right?
And this move...
i i don't see how there is a positive outcome for this for apple regardless of the motivation say the motivation it has nothing to do with the new laptops like it just seems like a net negative no matter how i slice it and so if it was if it is a change meant to address a customer concern no matter what that customer concern is i honestly don't see how getting rid of it will help now i i understand it in a kind of naive sort of
uh just very sort of one-sided view of the world and that the battery meter is not accurate the holidays are coming we don't have time to fix it to stop people from seeing inaccurate information or remove it with the idea that we'll fix it and put it back but we don't have time now but
I don't think you would think about that solution for any period of time until you realize that doesn't really help.
That makes things worse, probably.
If it's not working and we're going to fix it, then fix it.
If you don't have time to fix it now, fix it later.
If you don't want to fix it later because people are upset now, issue a statement.
But removing it, especially since that information is available elsewhere in the US and through third-party apps anyway...
It just seems like not a good move PR wise, again, regardless of the motivation, even the motivations are entirely pure of like we realize there's a problem with the new max and that meter and it's showing bad information.
Right.
Because it doesn't it doesn't solve a problem.
Customers have it might solve a problem.
Apple has in terms of support requests and Apple might think it solves the perception problem, although I really doubt it does.
But does it solve a customer problem?
I guess maybe the customer problem I might be solving is, like, Marco's insistence on not having badges on his applications to tell you about how many things you haven't done in them to remove anxiety.
But it really depends, because unlike notifications to tell you how many unread things you have in Instapaper or whatever...
if you hide the the time remaining for someone who's used to constantly looking up to see the time remaining all you've done is replace one anxiety with another the new anxiety is i have no how much i i have no idea how much time i have remaining normally i know how much time i have remaining really they don't they're just looking at a number that's like a random guess or not random but that is that is an estimate based on current whatever like but
It's not removing anxiety because it's not as if when they glance up there and don't see the time remaining, they're going to relax and say, oh, I guess I don't have to worry about it anymore.
No, they're going to be like, but what is the time remaining?
Let me launch activity monitor and check.
Not a wise decision, Apple, I think.
And the best thing for them to do is if the number is misleading or inaccurate or problematic in some way, make it better.
Yeah, this...
There are a number of separate issues here, and I think we need to be careful to talk about them separately and to not let them bleed into each other where they don't need to, because that's a quick way to just lose a discussion and get sidetracked.
So there's multiple problems here.
Problem number one is that the battery estimate meter can be and sometimes is inaccurate.
Okay.
But I've actually found, you know, I've been using Apple laptops for more than a decade now.
And I have found the battery meter to be a pretty good, rough estimate.
It's not like it says you get two hours and you actually get 10.
It's not off by that much.
It usually gives you a pretty good estimate of the number of hours you will roughly get if you continue using the computer the way you're using it right now and the way you have been using it for the last few minutes.
But that mental model that you just described...
I don't know if everyone else has the same mental model.
Sure.
What you described is how most, you know, long time Mac users use it, which is like you said, you look up at that number and then what the number is trying to tell you, because it's not an instantaneous measurement.
The number is trying to tell you is if you keep doing what you've been doing in the recent past,
We think this is what you're going to get.
And you and I and most people use that number to say, oh, I better not keep doing whatever the hell I'm doing because my time... Like, in other words, we are never surprised when that number goes up, right?
Because we understand why it goes up.
It's, oh, it's because I quit that application or I stopped that render or whatever I was doing.
Of course, the number is going to go up.
I think regular people...
When they look at that number and it says X and then half an hour later, they look at the number and it says X plus 50 minutes are perplexed and don't understand how that could be the case and start thinking that it's not right.
So I think the number is I think that readout is.
It's not conveying the mental – your mental model happens to match the way it works, but I don't think the number itself on its own conveys that to people.
So I think the number is problematic.
It is – well, it's problematic as it was displayed before as – if it's treated as fact.
So, for example, it's problematic to give minute-level precision on that estimate because it isn't that accurate.
It isn't going to tell you, like, oh, your laptop is going to die in exactly 6 hours and 37 minutes.
Like, no, that's not what's going to happen.
But...
The value that it had before in giving you a rough estimate of what you have left, again, even if the granularity is number of hours you have left, that is actually pretty accurate for a lot of people's uses.
And so we have a number of problems combining here to make Apple decide to take action here.
One of them is, I think, pretty clearly the reviews have all been stating, have all basically agreed.
And that customers, not just crazy reviewers, but actual customers have all kind of seen like, you know...
I'm not really getting more than like five to seven hours of battery life on this 10-hour battery life laptop.
That's been a pretty common thing people have said.
My personal experience matches that pretty well.
The other problem is, as I mentioned before, modern laptops, the main ways they've gotten more efficient is by reducing the amount of power they use when they're not doing much.
And when they're really doing a lot or when the GPU is on or whatever else, the top of that power range they can reach has actually not moved very much.
And they've gotten smaller and lighter by shrinking the batteries by assuming a bunch of idle power or a bunch of idle time.
But again, if you push them, if you make them do anything, they're still using as much power as they used to.
So basically, as we keep making these advancements and making idle power lower and lower and lower, but keeping active power kind of the same...
What we're seeing is an increasing difference in real world battery life depending on what you're doing.
So it used to be like, you know, back in the olden days of like, you know, the Core Duo and the G4 and everything.
Back in those early days when we hadn't made all these advances in idle power reduction.
The difference in how much battery life your computer would get if you were pushing it hard versus if you were just browsing the web was a pretty small difference, relatively speaking, today.
Maybe if you were really gentle on it, you might get like 50% or 75% or 100% more battery life.
Whereas today, if you're like using the CPU hard or if you're playing a game versus if you're browsing the web and doing nothing else in the background, that difference could be the difference between 90 minutes and 11 hours of battery life.
Yeah.
It's so ridiculous, but you're right.
Those are real numbers.
That's actually what happens.
It's surprising.
The difference is vast now, depending on what you're doing.
And so that factor has, over time, made the battery meter less accurate.
So there is, you know, because as what you do changes, like if you have just spent three hours browsing the web in Safari with no pages that triggered WebGL, then great, you're all set.
But then if you go and somebody sends you a message effect and the GPU turns on...
and something else tries to keep the gpu on for some other reason then all and and then at the same time like a time machine backup starts and and photos decides to analyze some photos for you like then you could your your estimate for the last three hours none of this stuff was happening might have told you you had five more hours left but now all of a sudden because your computers are doing things that use way more power than than what you're using before you might only have one hour left
That's why the fixing it, like the idea of like, oh, if the number is bad, fix it.
Fixing it doesn't mean just make it put a better number because there is no better number because it can't predict the future.
Fixing it probably means changing it from something that tells you a supposed amount of time remaining to something that graphically displays...
memory like as a like a burndown graph or usage over time like you have to you'd like to see your representation lets you know you were using energy at this rate here's your total energy that you have you were using at this rate then more recently you'd be using at this rate and therefore like here's the rest of the time remaining like some kind of graph or something yeah some other representation that probably doesn't fit in the menu bar maybe you can do it as a spark line but then you click on it to get a bigger thing because
Like you said, with this increase in the difference between idle and active power, this ever-increasing difference, it becomes almost impossible to ever put a single number up there that's representative because the variability is too much.
By fixing it, I mean...
give the people using the customer problem is I have to know how long I have left and should I do something differently to change that?
Right.
And, and also like people don't know what they should do differently.
Right.
So you need to give them feedback and,
did quitting that app help it or let me go look click the menu bar icon and see the graph and see like some line level out or something or not like that's that's the customer problem is i gotta know how long i have and if i if i need to stretch it if i need to you know get a little bit more time out of it i'm gonna try a bunch of random crap hopefully the the energy saver menu will tell me like which apps are using a lot of energy like the that feature they had in mavericks or whatever
hopefully i'll take some action based on that and then have confirmation from this thing that tells me oh yes you've you've now changed things so that it looks like you're you're back on track and doing that with a single number that fluctuates up and down i think is not as useful as some other thing that gives a historic forward and backward perspective on uh on things
John, only you would want a burn down chart for your battery power.
Marco doesn't even know what that is.
Nope, not at all.
It's all right.
It's fine.
It's in the parking lot.
Yeah.
So basically, I see the line of thinking that could lead Apple to think, we should just get rid of this meter because it's not very accurate anymore.
But it has a lot of value.
And so to to completely get rid of it, you because if you just look at a percentage, all you know is where my battery is right now.
But on something that gets one and a half to 12 hours of battery life, that percentage is not very useful.
You know, like you got to do the graph in your head.
You have to be like, I looked at it five minutes ago and it was this number and I looked at it now.
It's this number.
And so if I make the slope of that line like you're doing the graph in your head.
Right.
And so it is very, very helpful.
And this is not just a geek thing.
I don't want to hear from people saying regular people don't need the estimate.
No.
Anybody who uses a laptop on battery power and wants it to last a whole flight or a whole day or a whole span.
often needs to know, am I going to make it, given what I'm doing?
Is my battery enough?
That is the problem of the modern age.
Is my battery going to make it?
This is a real problem for a lot of people in a lot of situations.
To have something that can indicate whether your battery is going to make it is very useful.
And while the time estimate has never been perfect, and as discussed, is actually getting less perfect over time, it is something.
And they replaced it with nothing.
The percentage meter does not replace the need for you to know, am I probably going to make it or not?
It doesn't.
It is not good enough.
And it's different with laptops versus phones because phones are so easy to carry extra batteries for.
Laptops really aren't.
You know, the whole USB-C future that will eventually be here where we can have a bunch of extra batteries for our laptops, that's really only true for the 12-inch MacBook and only just barely.
Because that has very low power draw.
It's in the realm of big tablet power draws.
So you can get a battery pack for those that's small and outputs 15 watts, and that's enough.
You're never going to get a battery pack that's going to be small and light and can power your 15-inch MacBook Pro for a meaningful amount of time.
Or that can recharge it quickly so you can get back to using it.
Like, it's just too much power.
Batteries are big and heavy.
That's not going to happen in a compelling package for a very long time, if ever.
So, it is very important for you to know when you're using your flagship 15-inch professional-grade laptop...
that has this nice big 75 watt hour battery in it uh and that can possibly draw up to 87 watts at full load it's very nice to know whether you're going to make it without a charge or not to what you have to do to you know at the end of the flight or day or whatever because if you if you mess up that estimate you're basically out of luck like you're basically just not going to have a computer for a few hours because
You can't just plug in a little lipstick battery from Amazon that was $4 and charge it up again.
It doesn't work that way.
So to treat it like a big phone is not a good analogy.
It just doesn't work.
Well, there is one phone feature that you could use, though.
You're thinking more fixes for this thing.
Treating it like a big phone made me think of what do you do on your iPhone?
Say you're on your iPhone and you're on a cross-country flight and you want to be doing stuff on your phone.
There's no time remaining on the iPhone, but you look at the percentage of
and you kind of know how long your phone usually lasts and you're like it's not going to make it what would you do well i'd plug it in yeah i shoot the hostage no yeah plugging it plugging in i guess that is an option because like i said the phone is but uh low power mode i was thinking of low power mode right so on the phone uh the phone first of all the phone itself will go into low power mode but you can turn it on yourself manually at any time and you're hoping what that will do is like you don't know it's just switching preferences or i think it's in is it in a control center now i forget
um a low power mode will you know you basically say go into like camel mode just try to like not do stuff and and be more calm a low power mode for mac os but it's as simple as a switch
would solve the customer problem better than the very geeky, silly solution I was suggesting of graphs and everything, which would be totally cool and would convey the information.
But again, the customer problem is, like you said, am I going to make it?
And so in this respect, treating it like a phone and having a low-power mode switch...
I think is one possible viable solution.
And maybe Apple's got that planned and maybe ditching this is, you know, an ill-advised transition where they get rid of this and replace it with low power mode.
And I'm hoping low power mode doesn't already exist in macOS.
And I just don't know that because I haven't reviewed the last two versions, but you guys can confirm.
Slacker.
And this leads to another problem, too, which is the small laptops, the Escape and the 13-inch touch bar and the MacBook One, these all suffer from moderate battery life because they're so small.
And that's generally part of the trade-off of getting a very, very small laptop is usually battery life isn't very good because batteries are big and heavy.
So to get something very small, you've got to take a smaller battery life.
That's okay.
Okay.
on on the bigger ones like the 15 inch um you know typically you get pretty good battery life uh you know and this hasn't always been the case but you know generally speaking that's you know it's supposed to be pretty good however on the 15 inch as i mentioned in previous episodes there used to be an option to not get a discrete gpu on the base model that option is no longer present on the current line so every 15 inch comes with a discrete gpu that is dynamically switched to so it has both the integrated gpu that uses almost no power
And then the discrete GPU, the big AMD or ATI, whatever it is, AMD one, that it switches to whenever it feels that it needs more graphics horsepower.
And this is automatic switching.
And there's an option in settings to lock on the discrete GPU to not automatically switch.
Almost no one should ever enable that option because that just locks on the very high power draw, very hot external GPU.
However, there is no option to only lock on and to only use the low power integrated GPU.
That's the first thing the low power mode would do, obviously.
Right.
So basically, and there's a utility by Cody Krieger called Graphics Card Status, GFX Card Status, that shows you which one is in use at any given time.
And when I've been doing my testing, it can even show notifications when the discrete one turns on.
So you can kind of tell why it turned on, based on what you just did.
And it can tell you, of course, which apps are holding it on as well because it's held by an app basis.
So you can tell if apps are misbehaving or if something's using it that you don't really think you need to be doing right now, you can turn it off to save battery life.
Because the battery usage when the discrete GPU is active is substantially higher.
And you get substantially noticeably worse battery life when that high-powered GPU is on.
However, as I said, there's no option to say, whatever you do, do not turn that GPU on.
And I would love to know from people in the know with the engineering, maybe ATP tipster, is there a hardware reason?
Is there some reason?
why there can't be an option that says only use the integrated gpu right now because that would make a huge difference in battery power like i i've heard various times that like you know sometimes it's required when if you have an external display plugged in because because like the way the way it's integrated in and that's that would be understandable because most people when they're using an external display are plugged into power or not on a plane unless they're the iMac and Panera Bread again right because something's powering the display so obviously someone should do that though right
Bring an external display with you on your flight and just put it on the train next to you.
Right.
But anyway, I would like to know why that option isn't there.
And there might be a good reason.
But if there isn't a good reason, that option needs to be there.
Because...
we know that the gpu the integrated gpu is good enough for a lot of things it is not a great gpu it is not a high power gpu we have a different high power gpu for those needs but if i'm using the laptop and i need to eke out every bit of power from it if i'm on some kind of long plane trip or something and as you said like this is low power mode right like if you want your laptop to go in low power mode you have to make sure that discrete gpu never turns on and there's currently literally no way to prevent that
Like Cody Krieger's graphics card status, on older computers, it would be able to actually block the switching and lock it on integrated only.
But on the more modern Macs, that doesn't happen anymore.
It can try, but then what happens is the discrete one turns on anyway.
However it works, it seemingly isn't able to override the system behavior now.
I would love to have that option be there.
We also know, in the last generation, they had...
As I mentioned, they had the option without getting a discrete GPU at all.
I've heard from various people that the current Skylake CPU generation from Intel, that the GPUs aren't very good.
And that would be a plausible reason why Apple wouldn't offer that option, that basically they're too slow to offer that as a good computer.
But I would love the option to opt into that sometimes when I really need the battery power.
So that would be great if Apple wants to address its battery issues with the 15-inch MacBook Pro.
The smaller ones, they have different issues.
Mostly because they just have really small batteries because that's how they're supposed to sit in light.
But the 15-inch, one of the biggest issues is that GPU switching.
And if I have a way to disable that, this laptop will last a lot longer.
We'll put a link in the show notes to Ars Tactica's review of the Touch Bar laptop.
So in their battery test, this is their sort of light Wi-Fi, you know, web browsing battery test.
And they did a test with the discrete GPU on and one with it off.
And the one with it off, they got 15 hours of battery life.
This is out of the 2016 15-inch MacBook Pro.
and uh with a discrete gpu on seven hours so i mean there's still light usage so seven hours is still pretty good but they're just web browsing but that's that's a 2x difference doing the exact same activity you know the only difference is the discrete gpu is on or off so a low power mode that i mean that's that's the gimme like turn off the discrete gpu and accept that you're you know you're not gonna be playing any games because your graphics problems would be terrible
but think of all the other things you could do marco's favorite thing you know photos analyzing his pictures in the background uh time machine backups like just so everything that the phone does in low power mode stops as many optional background activity type things that it can possibly stop uh you know or you know just pauses them or delays them or whatever just don't do that stuff clock down the processor do like whatever you have to do to because that's you know when you go into low power mode whether automatically because your your battery is getting low which would be a good idea
or just uh you know at the beginning of your flight do it it's like xcode will run fine in low power mode like your compiles might take longer but the typing part will be fine like it's not you don't you're not doing anything that grassibly intensive and it's not like they have no gpu there is a wimpy crappy gpu built into the you know the integrated gpu is not as may not be as good as it was uh in the past but it will get you by and you know it it
another thing we'll put in the show notes is a link to this big explanation of how mac developers can make their applications better behaved because there are many things that system frameworks and your own application might do to unknowingly turn on the discrete gpu it's not as if there's some like
The call that you make that says, hey, I would like to turn on the discrete GPU.
The whole point is it's automatic.
It automatically turns it on when it needs it and doesn't use it when it doesn't.
But apparently that's an opt in type of thing.
And if you don't opt into it, your application will not automatically switch between integrated and discrete.
And the default is just use the discrete all the time.
If you do any of these sort of activities that think they might need it at some point in your application.
So there could be a software factor here where people just need to update their applications to be nicer.
But I wouldn't look for that to save anyone's bacon unless there's some specific application that you're using all the time that's going to benefit from this.
Because Apple has been preaching this for years and years and years about how to make your applications energy efficient.
And they have a lot of great tools and a lot of great ideas.
But the bottom line is...
Over the past five to ten years, it seems like application developers have not prioritized the energy efficiency of their application very highly.
Like, they'll spend more time on performance and bugs and features, rightly so, probably, than energy efficiency.
Apple itself has probably been one of the best companies in terms of making their applications use less power.
Just look at how much power Safari uses compared to Chrome to see how seriously they take this.
So Apple is highly motivated to do it because they make the hardware.
other vendors seem to be less inclined to do that and that leads to the other solution which we have talked about so many times in the past to this problem you know you've got low power mode you've got a proving the way that people see the information you've also got sorry for the umpteenth time make the laptop two millimeter sticker and put more battery in it because if you make the battery life good enough that people like
get through the day ish or it seems about the same or better than the previous one then there is way way less fretting about oh we need a new way to present this information to the user that's accurate or blah blah blah like it just stops being a concern the same way that
battery life on ipads mostly stopped being a concern uh i mean for the first one but the fact that it was 10 hours like oh well you know from from ipad to ipad when it fluctuates from like i used to get 10 in the previous one and i get eight on this one or nine or 11 and but it's long enough that it's not a big deal right whereas it seems like the 15 inch laptops in particular have been existing on the border where it's like
Not enough to get you through a whole day of hard work.
Maybe enough to get you through a cross-country flight of medium work.
And so fluctuations like this, especially when there can be a 2x range between discrete and integrated GPU uses, it's well within the, you know, discomfort range.
So if you could add an hour or two so that basically that it seems like, for the most part, in regular usage, your 2016 15-inch MacBook Pro gets about the same battery life as your 2015...
then all of a sudden all these concerns that we were talking about become much less urgent in exchange for you having a thicker laptop.
So I don't know if Apple's ever planning on pursuing that, but it's not like they don't have that option.
They do make the hardware.
Yeah.
Fair enough.
Now, Marco, your post that you put up about this, I have to ask, I feel like you're trying to give a subliminal message here, but I just can't put my finger on what it is.
It's not subliminal when the picture is like the giant, it's like bigger than the text.
Yeah, there's a little bit of inception going on here.
I just had to congratulate you because at first I didn't understand where you were going with this.
How?
And it took a... Well, no, no, no.
Like I looked at the first picture and I was like, okay.
And then I looked at the second picture.
Why is there a picture of a cow?
Right, no, seriously.
I did not understand what you're driving at until like I think the third picture.
Then I was like, oh.
And then my favorite was figuring out what the relevance of the last picture was.
So no, that was well done.
So...
I argue all kidding aside, this your post anyway seems to be a pretty clear statement that you think that this is a poor choice.
How would you phrase it now?
Like, what do you think about this?
Is this a good idea?
Is this a bad idea?
So, again, there are multiple issues here, right?
So, one of the issues is, is this battery meter accurate?
A second issue is, is it worth removing it?
Because it does serve a lot of useful purposes for people, right?
And to remove it with no replacement that can serve those purposes of, like, basically gauging whether you're going to make it or not.
That is not great, right?
And another issue is...
are they doing this in response to criticism of the battery life of these machines is, is not great.
So I think the answer to question number one of like, is the battery meter accurate?
The answer is, well, sometimes, but I think it's accurate often enough to be useful.
And,
And I wouldn't necessarily remove it for that.
I might reduce its precision and drop it down to just hours and not show minutes.
But that's just me.
I don't work for Apple.
Maybe there's a reason.
Okay.
Question number two of like, is it a good idea to make this removal with nothing that can replace it?
And I'd say no, it isn't.
Fortunately, those of us who care, we can install third-party utilities or just look in Activity Monitor because it's like iStatMenus has it, Activity Monitor has it, Coconut Battery has it because all these things are querying the low-level IOKit framework and IOKit's giving the same estimate.
So not only can third-party apps provide their own estimates, but they're using the same data source, I think, in most cases.
They're using the same data source that is the thing that was driving that menu bar.
So it's not like you're even getting a different estimate.
you're getting the same underlying framework that's reporting these numbers just in a different UI.
So that's cool.
I personally use iStatMenus for that, and I like iStatMenus quite a bit.
So go check that out.
So basically, question number one, Apple had a maybe okay answer for that one.
Question number two, removing it without having any replacement for this function, I don't think Apple has a good answer for that.
And question number three, is this actually just a response to try to...
maybe cover up the battery problem a little bit.
And I don't think Apple would have a good response to that either.
Um, at least one that would be believable.
Uh, so basically to me, this reads poorly.
This reads like a PR bandaid on, uh,
what is a legitimate product shortcoming that i hope apple addresses and not a successful band-aid not even a good band-aid right this is what i'm saying it's not it's only nefarious if it's a clever way to keep people quiet this this will do the have the opposite effect right so now the the interesting footnote to this is that the early reports of this os update
are that it actually improves battery life noticeably.
Of course.
Of course, making this more complicated and kind of hilarious.
So apparently, there were some issues with the GPU management.
You don't say.
And apparently some of these issues have been fixed in the .2 release.
I personally am seeing with my now illicit tools to show me a battery estimate...
I'm now seeing estimates of more like 12 hours under my idle usage.
And I haven't, I mean, I've only had this update installed now for a few hours.
So I really can't give a real report yet.
But Mac rumors already has a thing about it saying like they're hearing from people to like, it seems like this might be a real thing that this update actually does improve battery life noticeably on this on this computer, at least at idle.
I'm guessing how much of this is the end of your first run experience jobs?
You're talking about ending the photo library stuff?
Spotlight, photo library, all the crap on a fresh Mac that's newly signed into your iCloud and doing all the stuff that happens after you do an install and put all your apps on it.
And you were mentioning how it was taking forever for photos to be done doing whatever the hell it was doing.
Maybe it's done now?
uh nowhere close no photos i'm honestly thinking about just leaving iCloud photo library and just moving on because the the the mac app oh i first of all i i think i don't want to make this a complaining show about apple because i actually have been very positive this episode so far for the most part however um the the photos for mac app um i i i
It has so much potential, and I would say almost all of its potential is unrealized.
That's the nicest way I can put it.
Well done.
And I do think that the decision that Apple did this summer to have their...
their photo object recognition basically be done on device and then to not sync that across other devices.
So basically every device you set up has to do its own image and object recognition and face recognition in the photos app.
I think that that was a mistake.
It's not really a decision based on the talk show live where this very issue was brought up.
It was so clear from I think it was Craig answering the question that the only reason that's the case is because they didn't have time to do the better solution.
Well, that's a decision then.
It was their decision to ship it.
Definitely, I wouldn't want to wait a whole extra year for this application.
Well, but you weren't waiting for the application.
You were only waiting for the search, the object search.
Yeah, I appreciate the object search enough that I'm willing to... I mean, granted, I don't have laptops, right?
But I'm totally... I will pay the price for... And mine did the same thing, by the way.
The same, like, sir, when is this ever going to finish?
And is there a way I can make it go and let me leave my computer on and set it not to go to sleep?
I did all the same things you did.
So I had all the same frustrations...
And yet still, I would say that the benefit I get from being able to type something in and find photos is worth it to me.
So I've had this laptop now for, I mean, this one I've had for over a week.
And it is less than halfway done scanning my photo library.
Is it making any progress?
That's the key.
Mine, for a long time, didn't look like it was making any progress.
It's making very slow progress.
I'm keeping track, too.
I just screenshot the people tab where it shows you the actual number.
Because you can't memorize it and do the graph in your head, right?
Right, exactly.
Right.
There you go!
I don't know how to make it go.
Anyway, it seems that the photo indexing is not mostly a battery problem because when it's on battery, it doesn't seem to do it.
It seems to be smart about that.
When you plug it in,
the photos agent will require the discrete gpu and we'll start doing the the indexing so i believe it's gpu based or at least gpu assisted which is nice that's one of the things by the way wwdc that they've emphasized for years and years being having all sorts of power assertions and being aware of the context that you're in and if you're on battery life like that's that's what they want to happen instead of having like a big low power mode button or anything like that they just want applications to be smart and understand what the deal is and
you know behave like apple's things like oh use super low priority io and don't even run this at all if you're on battery and do all they have apis for all this stuff but a like i said it's low down on developers priority list and b even though they have all that stuff on a platform like ios it is still both useful and i think recommended to have a low power mode that comes on automatically when you're really low and that the user can put on anytime they want because
That is the right granularity, I feel like.
One switch somewhere easily accessible with some visual indication that it's on with the yellow battery meter or whatever iOS shows.
I still think that's a feature they should totally add to Mac OS.
I agree.
And on iOS, I actually do, in Overcast, whenever I have any kind of sync activity, I have a lot of choices about...
How much do I wait and coalesce all these sync updates before I actually make a network request to my server?
And, you know, as you listen to a show, like how often do I report to the server?
What timestamp you've listened up to so that it can sync to your other devices reliably?
Like I have all sorts of like, you know, coalesce delays and granularity delays, things like that.
And I run them all through a function.
that applies multipliers based on the current power state whether you're on wi-fi or cellular whether your battery is above certain thresholds and whether the low power mode is activated so like when low power mode is activated i believe i just multiply everything by like four or something like just like make everything really spaced out and so like and i actually dynamically adjust all of those you know based on all those different factors of like you know basically how much power do you have to spare and how much power will this take right now so like if you're on wi-fi i give i do things more often so
If you're on cellular, I don't.
So I have all these different multipliers in there, and it really helps a lot to control my app's battery usage.
But I did all that because it matters.
On iOS, it matters a lot, and it has mattered since the beginning of iOS.
On the Mac, for so long, I think developers weren't needing to do really much of that because it didn't really matter.
How much would that actually affect people's battery lives in the past?
But as we've moved towards this now...
massive delta between when the processor is active and when it's idle, this now massive delta of battery life, now it matters a lot more.
And so I hope Mac developers are conscientious of this, as many Mac developers use 15-inch MacBook Pros.
So I hope that they are conscientious to this and will actively work to reduce their app's energy usage now that the Macs that people actually run their software on
basically now it matters a lot more whether their apps are responsible or not because again before it didn't matter much at all and now it matters a lot and as time goes on it's very clear that you know we've been on this on this path for a while now that
We are going to continue to make idle power savings and continue to not really lower the ceiling very much of maximum power.
So this issue is only going to get worse.
This delta is only going to get larger over time as we make these further advancements in power efficiency.
So it will only become more important over time.
for everyone to really optimize their power usage when you're on battery.
And so I hope people do.
I hope the Mac developer ecosystem is healthy enough that people have the motivation and resources to update their apps that much.
I hope that they are conscientious enough to do it.
And I look forward to seeing if they do.
I think the future is desktop computers, though, don't you think?
God.
Thanks for our three sponsors this week, Fetterment, Hover, and Squarespace, and we will see you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
Accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
It's accidental.
Accidental.
They didn't mean to.
Accidental.
Accidental.
have you been watching any more grand tour kids no everyone says it sucks so i've just decided you're the only one left watching it casey yeah it kind of seemed like based based on you know casey based on what you wrote and what i've seen a few other people say as well uh it really does seem like i got the best of all worlds by watching episode one and then stopping
I don't know if that's entirely true.
I stand by skip episode two, or come back to it well after the fact.
I do still like the show, but man, I don't love it like I used to.
Well, I mean, admittedly, that was a different show if you want to be pedantic about it, but you know what I'm driving at.
um i'm curious to see what this week brings not having seen all of the the ones past episode one that everyone says are horrible even just seeing episode one even though i enjoyed it i could see this path of you know we talked about it here this path of like you know this seems like they're pushing a little hard on these certain areas that don't work
And even, you know, honestly, even in the last couple seasons of the BBC Top Gear show with them on it, you know, that version of it, you could tell it was starting to go in some directions that were cringeworthy and it was starting to lose, you know, some of the bits were getting a little more contrived and it was starting to lose some of its charm in a lot of it as it got like seemingly more contrived and seemingly less just kind of like raw, I guess.
Yeah.
Well, that's the thing is that, you know, I'm pretty good at being able to watch, you know, a film or a TV show and not pick apart how it was made or what was real and what wasn't.
But where in Top Gear...
I could watch most of them and feel like it was a contrived situation that they just let play out, right?
You know, let's race to Verbier and see what happens.
And yes, there are probably more efficient ways to go than, I forget how that one went, but like bus to train to plane to train to bus to running, etc.
There's probably a more efficient way, but that should take around the same amount of time as it takes Jeremy to drive it.
So let's set it up so that it should be interesting and then let it play out.
And so there's a lot of that that was probably staged and deliberate, and I think a lot of it that wasn't.
Whereas in Grand Tour...
it seems like it's way heavy on staging everything to the point that it's obvious.
And as we discussed, I think, last time, I think the three hosts have forgotten that they're not actors, which is troubling.
And so the second episode was very self-indulgent and very much them trying to act.
The third episode I actually thought was pretty good.
I liked that one.
And then this last episode, some was good, some was not.
And so...
I don't know.
I'm curious to see where this goes.
I think, if I understand it right, this is a 12-episode run, I thought, although I might be wrong about that.
Maybe there's only a couple more.
Either way, I'm curious to see how this plays out.
Now, John, you also have not been watching.
Is that correct?
That's mostly just because I haven't had time to watch anything.
I have been sitting there with my iPad, which is where I usually watch this thing, and thinking, oh, I should catch a few minutes.
I almost watched it.
It's not like I'm...
against ever watching it again but uh i will probably be leaning pretty heavily on the skip button to get to the part that has to do with cars yeah which man you're gonna you're gonna be doing a lot of skipping skipping yeah maybe or maybe i'll just have it on the background when i'm you know doing something else i don't know
yeah yeah top gear never really used to be a second screen kind of show for me or yeah i never used to really like what look at twitter while i was watching top gear and and i caught myself barely paying attention during i don't know like the second or maybe fourth episode it's okay though it's okay now marco in a semi-related note is this your first winner with the tesla yeah yeah because i got i got it like in march or april so uh yeah anything interesting come of that
Well, we haven't had any snow yet, really.
It snowed for like five minutes one night, and that was it.
So we haven't really had winter weather to deal with it yet.
Did you change tires?
I'm not planning on doing it this year.
I will see how it works, because I have all seasons now.
Like with the M5, I had, you know...
basically like flat balls of rubber on there for the summertime but like its stock tires were like comically ineffective in any kind of slippery or cold weather so i i used winter tires you know seasonally for that because i kind of had to to make it useful um this you know the tesla's all-wheel drive as i mentioned when i did the test drive which was last february on a really cold day with a whole bunch of like
you know mud and crap and gravel all over the roads i was blown away by how good the all-wheel drive system was i know that um battery range is going to be less in the winter because a combination of just batteries being less effective at very cold temperatures and also using the heaters will reduce the range a lot so i expect that and that's you know i i knew that going in that's fine we'll see how it goes in practice but i'm not concerned really
Um, I'm looking forward to the all wheel drive.
I'm looking forward to seeing how it performs, uh, in, in horrible conditions.
Um, and yeah, that's it.
I, I had to, um, start up my snowblower recently, which was interesting.
Did you end up with a gas one or an electric one?
I don't recall.
I ended up with a gas one.
It was delivered about a day after the last snow of last season.
Naturally.
So the guy who delivered it started it up for me to show me kind of how to do it and then put it in the garage and waited for snow, which never came.
So at the end of the season, various people who knew about such things... Because I've never owned a gas-powered lawn appliance of any sort.
So I had no idea how to take care of them.
So I asked some friends and did some research on the internet and asked the company who made it.
I did their support thing.
and uh basically the recommended thing that they said was like you know to basically drain the engine like to run it dry uh so i had to start it up once like in april to do this to to just run it dry from the little bit of gas that they delivered it with took me a very long time to figure out how to start it up even though it has electric start delightful that's what your tesla has done to you don't even know how to start an internal connection engine anymore exactly
And, you know, it has like, you know, like the choke squishy thing and there's all sorts of stuff on there.
I'm like, I don't know how to do this.
The squishy thing.
That is a technical term for that.
Yeah, yeah.
And so then that was like April and I put it away all summer.
And then so just like two weeks ago or last week, I had to finally take it out again because everyone says you should like start it up.
Make sure it starts, you know, gas it up before the big snowstorm, which, okay, that makes sense.
I never do that.
I know you're, I totally know you're supposed to and they're right.
I thought about that earlier.
Like, at the same time you were probably thinking about it, I had that same thought.
And I said, you know what?
I've never done that before, and I'm probably not going to do it again.
Yeah.
So, you know, I put gas in it.
And of course, because A, I'm me, and B, I don't want to deal with it.
I'm using, like, the expensive, like, special gas that comes in, like...
broke spray sized cans that has the pre-mix like treatments and everything so it's like optimized for the this engine so basically so i don't have to use any kind of like you know preserver and it's stable and and you could order it by mail for some reason i don't know how that's legal but you can
Anyway, so I put in a little bit of my fancy gas and I wish I was video recording myself trying to start this up again because, of course, I completely forgot the procedure.
And also, of course, I was too lazy to go find the instruction book.
In case he wasn't there to read it for you.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I did eventually get it.
Well, Casey would have needed it because you're like a real person who's operated gas things before.
But I'm not one of these people.
Was it really any more complicated than flipping a switch, pumping a few things and hitting the starter and maybe moving a choke lever?
Was there really more to it?
Am I not grasping the full complexity of this?
i think that ended up being right okay so somehow i got it started eventually i pushed a bunch of things and turned a bunch of things and twisted a bunch of things and pulled some things and eventually it worked and then eventually i'm like why is it sputtering so much oh i gotta turn this thing from start to go and so yeah so it was i wish i wish you were there to laugh at me during this process i wish i was there to laugh at you
Like a friendly neighbor to come over to put you out of your misery.
I mean, you're right.
The fact that it had an electrical starter really dampens the comedy effect because if it had a pull start, that would have been way more fun to watch you do.
Well, I couldn't get the electric start to work.
But I eventually pulled it and it started up upon pulling it.
With such ease, and I don't know if that's because it's new or because maybe the electric start assisted it upon pulling it.
Because when I was trying, there's a button next to where the plug goes in that's unlabeled.
And I plugged it in and I pushed it and nothing happened.
No response at all.
So I don't know if the electric start is broken or if I just... I need to read the manual.
Story of your life.
But I did end up pull starting it and it was super easy.
I was picturing when you see somebody trying to pull from a really old lawnmower and they're like...
the pulling like with all their bodily might and it's brand new and they have like you know it modern things are way easier to pull start than they used to be first of all and second of all the thing is brand new of course it better pull it better be firing before you even get through the first pull it's yeah i mean i i had to pull once and i was like oh now it's going like okay
um so yeah i did eventually figure this out it was comical i i do wish you guys were there uh because you would have had a ball uh making fun of me and i i do wish it was on a video but unfortunately i was not planning ahead you're all fun making fun of me when for when i this will be the year that my snowblower my snowblower that's what
16 years old or whatever that i do zero maintenance on that should have died like a decade ago this will be the year that it dies yeah it's older than my mac pro and i take less good care of it and every year i think this is this is going to be the year this thing doesn't start and every year it's like nope still going but we'll see
yeah and i always wait until like there's four feet of snow in front of my garage that's when i that's when i say well i wonder if this thing's gonna start this year never i don't start it ahead of time i don't it's like i do the only preparation i do is i usually make sure i have fuel for it i do that because you can't really get out to get fuel when there's four feet of snow um you can have fancy gas delivered yeah this is not fancy gas this is the opposite whatever the opposite of fancy gas is this is it
one of the main reasons i went with fancy gas besides that i'm you know i didn't want to have to deal with like stabilizers in the winter or in the summer and also i don't think i'm going to really use a lot of gas in this so i you know i don't think it's going to matter really but if you're going to run it dry anyway before you put it away like yeah whatever
i wanted to be doubly sure anyway um but i was also like one of the reasons also was like i i don't like the idea of driving to a gas station in my tesla and filling up a gas can and putting it in the back that's the best that's the best you should when when people ask you questions about it you're like this car is so fuel efficient all i need is this one gallon
there's no tanks like no you don't need a tank with a tesla you just fill up a little tub this this will last me all week people will totally believe you i actually saw a model x today which uh we i see model s's reasonably often in richmond but i saw a model x today it was very surprising still not sure if i like the look it's not gross it's not actively offensive to me but i don't think i terribly like it either
Yeah, the X, it looks a lot like a minivan.
It really does.
It doesn't look like a minivan.
It looks like a crappy SUV crossover turd thing.
That's a minivan.
No, a minivan is a minivan.
A minivan looks better than the Model X. I like the minivan shape.
It's being a more honest loaf of bread for transporting kids than these things, which are like...
I'm a Jeep Cherokee that's been squeezed out of somebody's butt.
Wow.
My word.
Oh, wow.
The closest I think I've come to ever liking one of those is some of the big Mercedes SUV-shaped things are not embarrassing looking, and a couple of the Land Rover ones might have a reasonable shape if their service details weren't that bad, but the X is gross.
I will say, X6, not bad.
I don't like that one either.
The X6?
Oh, God.
Adjust your eyeballs, sir.
No way.
It's kind of like Ty Ice-T.
When you first see it, you're like, oh, that's weird.
But then you're like, okay, I kind of get it.
I like Ty Ice-T more.
I don't think I would ever want an X6 for any reason.
But if I were forced to drive one, I'd be like, all right, yeah, I could deal with this.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Vetoed, application denied, no.