Pots Are Made to Be Broken
some point in the semi-near future we should do our i guess biannual which can either mean twice a year or every two years uh announcement on the show that there is more of the podcast after the song because i still occasionally i still occasionally you know wake up in the middle of the night and think i wonder how many people stop listening when the song plays it haunts me a little bit done that's our pre-show
that doesn't count as the announcement i need to like explain at length as it does no i well i mean fine you can put that in that's fine but i'm like i want to explain at length like the song plays and then the show continues and i know it's confusing but that's just what we do yes we have an after show it's after the theme song listen to it the end but we need to it needs to be explained how much more does it need this does not need to be it does not need to be belabored you think it doesn't need to be but trust me
like here's if you if you were more uh you know invasive instead of respecting people's privacy we could know exactly when they stop listening on overcast anyway but no you don't want to collect any data about anybody just ask the mid-roll they probably know sick burn sick burn
so it's been a big week huge week you could say because john syracuse you have your new file system on your phone assuming you've upgraded so how about them apples i did upgrade i upgraded my device and everybody's device uh i was very excited to do it it's a little less a bit less exciting than having on your mac because there's really no way as far as i've been able to determine to tell that you have apfs on your ios device short of you know digging around with some dev tool or whatever
one of the things that i heard people mentioning to try which makes sense to me is you know in uh settings general like storage usage or managed storage like somewhere you keep going down to the thing that tells you how much room is being taken up on your ios device by various applications and their files you know that screen well that screen in the old world had to crawl through each application's
you know little directory of stuff and add up the size of everything and it would take a while to load you'd see it like load some of the things then you'd wait and there'd be a little spinner and some more applications would appear and if you you know if you looked at it uh quickly you'd think oh the thing that's most using the most storage is whatever's on the top but just wait two seconds another app will come and another app
And I timed it on my old iPhone 6, and it was like 20-something seconds.
Now, I haven't upgraded that old iPhone 6 to APFS yet, but in theory, because one of the features that APFS has is what they call fast directory sizing, where the file system keeps track of the size of the stuff that's under a directory,
in real time all the time rather than having to crawl over it and calculate it when you ask for it in theory that screen oh wow how big everything is should be a lot faster because i didn't think to do this until i had upgraded almost every device in the house i don't actually have numbers on it but i can tell you that on my iphone 7 that i did upgrade it is two to three times as fast as it is on the iphone 6 that i didn't upgrade but anyway when i eventually went upgrade the iphone 6 i'll get timings um but
that's the first thing i could think of to like how how will this manifest in a way that you can notice the the other way all right now hold on hold on so just to be clear that's settings general this is in 10.3 storage and icloud usage and then manage storage and you'll see used and available and then uh you'll see all the stuff kind of populate all in one shot man no it's actually more than one shot but it's pretty darn quick it does it
It's not instant, which is what you would think it would be, which makes you think maybe it's not actually faster because like so many things after OS upgrades, there are a lot of sort of false indicators.
Any OS upgrade, Mac upgrade, phone upgrade, even just rebooting makes many things faster subjectively and objectively.
So it's very difficult to tell.
The other item that's not in the notes here but that has come up a lot is like, wow, I upgraded to 10.3 and suddenly I have more free space on my phone.
is that attributable to apfs maybe because of maybe like volume bitmap sizes and and file system metadata but that's a stretch most likely my theory is that it cleans out you know just rebooting and cleaning out cache files as part of the upgrade process for free space because you know how ios caches a bunch of crap in places that aren't really attributable to any particular application like ios
I don't know.
There's nothing specific in APFS unless they're doing a lot of copy and write cloning of duplicate files, which I don't think they are as part of the upgrade process.
I can't imagine getting back some huge percentage of disk space.
But I don't know.
I haven't heard a convincing explanation yet.
But certainly, it's possible that merely by rebooting or doing the OS upgrade and cleaning out temporary directories, you could free up a lot of extra space.
Some people have reported that the total capacity is reported differently, and that could be the case as well.
But there's a million things that could cause that.
But anyway, I would say...
fast directory sizing assuming it's even being used by that storage management screen could be way a way that you can tell this is happening but even if there is actually no way for you to tell that you've upgraded the file system you can get warm fuzzies inside knowing that a better file system is there under the covers and then erase those warm fuzzies with a giant eraser that says data integrity is still not being checked so
good luck i mean for what it's worth atp tipster in the chat has said that uh if you have a 64-bit device and you're running ios 10.3 you're running apfs yeah that's the story is you don't have a choice you get it whether you want it or not oh and one more item on av if that's the thing that's actually in here david reed wrote in to say that someone in an arabic speaking country was using his application on ios 10.3 public beta and they couldn't open their files until renaming them to english after upgrading from ios 10.2 to 10.3
This gets back to what we talked about at the end of the last show, that APFS does not normalize the character encoding of file names.
And I thought, as I said in the last show, well, that's a bummer if you're using raw access to the file systems through the BSD layer.
But surely if you're using Cocoa or UIKit or whatever, some high-level framework...
that you don't have to worry about this because it will do all that for you on the way down to the file system on the way back up.
But apparently that's not the case because I'm assuming David Reed is not using direct BSD APIs to do file IO.
If you have an application that is not careful with character encoding and writing out file names, it could be that previously it worked fine because you would say, give me the file called cafe.
with an e with an accent over it and doesn't really matter how you encoded that in unicode because the file system when searching for the file with that file name would take what you entered no matter how you did it normalize it that's what unicode normalization is is take a representation and encode it in just one way even though you can write that same word seven different ways pick one way to do it
There's a whole bunch of different normalizations defined by Unicode, but Apple's HFS Plus uses a weird variant of one of them.
And then when you compare to the list of files in the directory in the file system, just say, well, everything in the directory on the file system is normalized.
And the string that I'm comparing with, I just normalized.
And so I'll compare them to each other.
When I get a match, I find your file.
If, on the other hand, the file system like APFS doesn't do any normalization, I would assume that the file names in the file system that are preexisting from, like, you converted to 10.2 to 10.3, those are normalized according to the HFS normalization.
But maybe when you look for that file name and you send in your file, it is not normalized in the same way, and it will search the directory for a file with that name and never find an exact match and say, there's no file by that name, file not found.
And so that's why...
renaming the file to english would you know get it into you know ascii or something that isn't encodable in multiple different ways in the normal case would let you find the file so i don't know if this is an isolated case or we're going to see more of this but
This apparently is the conscious choice that Apple has made as evidenced by that radar that they closed saying, yep, this is the way APFS works.
That's not the way HFS works.
This is the future.
Everyone get used to it.
So one other thing to add, and I think Gruber had made mention of this on Daring Fireball, but I think it's worth noting that it is absolutely bananas to me.
that millions upon millions upon millions of iOS devices have been upgraded.
And I have not heard a single horror story of somebody's data getting lost, of some catastrophic thing happening.
I'm sure it did happen.
I'm sure there's someone listening to this show that might have had it happen to them.
But...
In terms of the circles I typically travel in, I have yet to hear anyone's horror stories.
And that is unbelievably impressive.
And even if there are a handful of horror stories, there's been so few that given the magnitude of the change that was made, it is preposterous to me that it has gone as well as it has.
It shouldn't be preposterous.
imposterous though because on a past episode like this is not to denigrate the the work the file system and the up and i would say also like the upgrade team whoever does the upgrader like did they did good work but this is how this is how things work in in technical circles and in programming um much much like marco's uh favorite hobby horse it doesn't really matter how hard you try on something that you don't get there's no points for effort um
staying really late and trying really hard and being a good person and all those things don't help uh what makes you avoid or makes you have a program that is successful uh and that works correctly is uh is design is like you know what what is the structure of this thing so as we discussed on band shows the way
This file system and many modern file systems works for that allows it to do this conversion is that it doesn't move any of the data.
It leaves everything exactly where it is.
It doesn't modify the file system at all.
It just writes a new set of metadata pointing to all the existing data.
And it can do that at its leisure at any point of that process fails or, you know, something.
It doesn't matter.
It has not done anything destructive to the file system.
Only after it has done a complete accounting with complete new metadata pointing to the other data that's sitting there at rest, not being moved, not being modified in any way, does it do one quick, small critical section that says, and switcheroo, use this instead of that.
And that tiny crit, like that's design, as opposed to saying, I'm going to convert this by...
you know doing like a you know slide puzzles where there's like a little open space and you know one one little tile is not there so you have to slide the tiles around into the constantly in the open space it could convert your file system piecemeal like that saying i'm going to use this free space to start writing a new file system i'm going to copy all the data a piece at a time to that new thing for pretty much that entire process your file system is hosed if anything fails at any point you have like a complete unbootable garbage system
and no matter how hard you try like oh i'm a really good programmer i'm going to make that process really foolproof you can't because the design is bad the reason this works flawlessly the only way you could ever get something like this to work as as you know as successfully as it has is with a design that allows you to do that so and this is another one of the advantages of modern file systems you couldn't do this with the conversion from hfs to hfs plus there were utilities to do it and they were terrifying right
um it's good design up front and also on top of that also a good execution of that design obviously so there's you know all credit where credit is due but i found that in my experience as a programmer for all these many years no matter how no matter how much effort and what a good job you do in execution if your initial design has doesn't have certain properties that you need
there's really not much you can do.
Whereas if you have a good design and you have one or two bugs, it's easy to shake them out and to be, you know, like it's like when you, when you design something that comes out better than you thought it did and it solves even more problems than you thought it would.
And it has fewer bugs than you thought, cause it's just a good design.
It's just a matter of like mechanically making that design successful.
It is so much less painful than when you, you know, do your best effort to implement something that is ultimately a flawed designer that you're asking to do something that it wasn't meant to do.
So yeah,
So kudos to the file system team for coming up with a file system that has this property in its design that it can do this.
And then also, by the way, successfully doing it.
Yeah, it's just it's really impressive.
And and, you know, I've heard rumors a couple of years ago right around New Year's about how
Their software reliability really had gone down the crapper, and this is a positive step in the other direction.
Yeah, I really am very impressed with the rollout of APFS.
If you would have asked us back when it was announced this past summer, what devices do we think will have it first?
I forget whether we actually did speculate on this or not, but we would have almost certainly said they would have been the most careful and would have taken the longest to put it on the iPhone.
because they have the most iPhones.
It's the most high-profile device, right?
The fact that they deployed on 100% of iPhones, well, 100% of 64-bit iPhones with this newest update first, as the first deployment of this file system, is incredibly impressive, very bold.
And the fact that, as you said, there were really seemingly no problems with it is incredibly cool.
Even though John says it's easy-ish, I know asterisk, asterisk, but you know...
I recognize that easy.
It's just the design allows it to happen.
Sure.
Like, you know what I mean?
That was the important part of the decision.
Not, you know, you know what I mean?
Like with this design, you, that's why I feel like they can be emboldened to do this because if they had a different design, no matter how careful they were, it could be that the correct move would have been, we can never upgrade people in place.
The only way we roll this out is by people buying new phones because we have no way to safely convert.
That would have had to be the decision if you didn't have a system like this.
Because it would be crazy to say, well, we're going to start these 50-minute upgrades, and if anything goes wrong at any point, people's phones are bricked.
And by the way, they lose all their data because we've just basically scrambled it into soup.
If that was the choice, you would have to say, there is no conversion.
You will get APFS when you buy a new iPhone.
That's it.
Yeah, and the fact that they were able to do this and that they just did it kind of silently in this point update.
It wasn't even like a major OS update.
That's pretty cool.
And it does make a lot of sense on a phone in the sense that, as we mentioned when this was first announced, on a phone, the entire software ecosystem around phones is meant for you to ideally, as long as you participate in the various cloud services and backup services...
that ideally your phone can get flushed down a toilet at any moment and you can go buy a new phone and log in and have everything just you know restore to it so in that sense it is kind of a lower risk than the way most people's max are set up but still deploying it to their largest device family and highest profile device family were like if anything went wrong it would have been massive headline news uh that was a bold move and they did it they did it well so kudos to them
yeah the other the countervailing forces of course why would they even bother doing it on the mac because they care so much more about the iphone so it's like how much you care about the product and want to invest in it versus the incredible danger as you said of like if you make a mistake on the iphone it's a big deal and i don't know if the 10.3 beta was longer than normal but i think having wider more public betas for longer periods of time is another another factor in making them feel
okay in going forward with this again even with the good design just to make sure that you know you do have everything worked out because because this doesn't move any of the data like this the conversion in effect does kind of an equivalent of the hfs plus fsck because it has to go find where all the data is again kind of like when you run disk first aid and it finds out like you know some some metadata is wrong because there's some space on your disk that it thought was occupied but it's actually free or something and it updates its metadata and
it has to crawl over every little bit of data and find out where all of it is.
So maybe that also is performed as part of the conversion.
But still, if there are mistakes somewhere on your disk, essentially, not that you have a disk in there, this is not going to fix them.
It's going to preserve them, and they're still going to be there.
So if you have some sort of problem, in theory, even though they're not modifying the data, it could, upon rebooting or doing something else because of the difference in the way APFS works, it could reveal a pre-existing HFS Plus problem.
I have no idea if phones ever run FSDK or how they deal with that, but considering they have run HFS Plus for so long, those same errors that we all find when we run Disk Utility on our Macs surely are there on our phones as well.
And nothing about this conversion process is going to help them along.
Oh, goodness.
All right, anything else on APFS?
I'm surprised.
I mean, this is your crowning moment, my friend, this and Swift.
I want it on my Mac.
I'm just a Mac guy.
I'm just a Mac guy at heart.
Like, it's cool that it's on the phone, but, you know, like, on the Mac, because you can feel the coolness more on the Mac.
On the Mac, in theory, if the Finder implements the, like, instant copy thing, you can take, like, a, you know, 20-gig file and duplicate it and see that it happens in a fraction of a second and your disk space doesn't go down.
You don't get the kind of experience on a phone.
Come on.
All right.
Tom Jones writes in.
That's not the singer, right?
He writes in, I heard John extolling the virtues of being able to just say to the air, how many teaspoons are there in a cup?
And his Amazon Echo would answer the question.
And Thomas provided the answer, which is 48.
While there's no doubt that this is a great thing to be able to do, you can also do that with the iPhone, something he would certainly know if he had said, what was it?
Ahoy Telephone, or if he had had an Ahoy Telephone enabled for more than a couple of weeks.
We talked about it in the last show, but apparently you didn't emphasize it enough.
What is the difference between... Setting aside how well the services do when they understand you.
What is the difference between hasty versus having a cylinder in your house that listens to you?
Oh, did I do it again?
See, it's not on my phone, so no problem here.
The big difference is that cylinders...
do not move like you plug them in to the wall and they're in a particular place.
Uh, and that also on top of that cylinders, in my experience have better microphones.
Maybe it's because they're stationary.
Maybe it's because they're upright.
Maybe it's because they just have more mics.
I think the Amazon echo has many mics in it.
Yeah.
Um, and what that means is the experience of talking to the air, uh,
uh two things one it's going to be more successful because the thing doesn't move and it has more mics so it's always going to be in the same proximity so you can get a feel for when and how can i say this and how loud do i have to speak to be heard and everything because it's not variable and two the most important thing that i mentioned when i was talking about talking to cylinders is
Getting over the idea, like getting yourself to instinctively understand that something is listening, understanding that you can talk to the air, because if you have to think about it first, hmm, maybe I should ask this to the air.
Oh, is the thing in the air nearby or listen to me like getting over that?
So it becomes unconscious.
And so you just expect it to be there.
uh to do that you have to you have to know you have to you have to not have to think about is the cylinder near where is it and with my phone my phone is all over the house right my phone could be upstairs downstairs in a different room or whatever the cylinders don't move and that lets me eventually become comfortable when i'm say in the kitchen which is always a fixed distance from where my cylinder is knowing that i can rely on the thing being there whereas i have i don't have to think about where is my phone
right or is my phone face down or face up or in a case or buried underneath someone's hat on a on an end table so it can't hear me or anything like that and so setting aside again what it does when it hears you and the variability of how good these devices are at this i think gruber just posted a thing about carplay versus android auto in which siri did not come out looking particularly good and not because it couldn't understand people because that is another fixed distance from microphone thing but
that you would think this is a minor thing but the cylinders being stationary and having better mics is what makes the experience get over the hump for me anyway from being maybe i could occasionally talk to my telephone if it happens to be nearby versus 100 when i'm in my kitchen i can shout out a you know a thing to set a timer and it will just be set and it will hear me the first time and it will always work and i don't have to think about where anything else i own is
We are sponsored this week by Backblaze, unlimited native online backup for Mac and PC.
For a free trial, visit backblaze.com slash ATP.
I love Backblaze because here's the thing.
I love online backup.
The concept of online backup is amazing because there are so many hazards that could happen to your computer that could lose your data.
And even if you have, say, a time machine drive or a local disk clone of some sort,
That is good.
You should probably have it.
Backless even says you should have that as well because it's fast to restore from those.
They can be very convenient.
But you also need online backup because there are lots of hazards that can happen to your computer that would also affect any backup drive that's connected to it or that's in the same house or apartment or business as the computer.
So things like fires, floods, theft, malware.
There are so many risks that can happen.
And online backup protects from so many of those.
It's such great peace of mind to just have it always be running.
It's automatic.
It's always there backing up your file safe and sound.
You don't have to remember to do anything.
You don't have to wait till you're at home or wait till the computer's asleep or whatever else.
It's just always running, always keeping you safe.
Backblaze is, in my opinion, and I've tried many of them, Backblaze is the best one of these.
They can't pay me to say that.
I'm telling you that because I believe it.
It is my favorite one.
It's the one I use, the one I trust my family's data to and all my business data to because Backblaze is great.
You have unlimited space.
You just pay per computer.
Five bucks a month for unlimited space per computer.
my wife has a computer i have a computer so we pay him 10 bucks a month i think we have like six or seven terabytes in there we have some obscene amount of storage in there because it's unlimited you just pay per computer and it backs up anything connected to that computer it's wonderful and they have great features like a mobile app so you can restore files right onto your phone or tablet ios and android so if you like
Want to get a file off your home computer?
If you're traveling or whatever else, you can get it through Backblaze.
They also have very easy restores.
You can go online for restores.
You can also have a hard drive overhanded to you via FedEx.
And if you send it back within 30 days, you get a refund.
They have such great options.
Their client is amazing, fully native code.
Nothing with Java or anything like that.
It's fully native code, and it's fast, and it does not choke when you have tons and tons of files like I do.
I love Backblaze.
I suggest you check it out.
Go to backblaze.com slash ATP for a 15-day trial.
No credit card required.
No risk.
A totally free 15-day trial.
Backblaze.com slash ATP.
Unlimited native online backup.
Thank you very much to Backblaze for sponsoring our show.
Tell me, John, about the even naked-er robotic core.
I hesitate to put this in here because it's another Apple patent thing, and it doesn't involve patent hands, which is the main thing I enjoy patents for.
Apple patents everything, and every time someone comes out with an Apple patent is published, the sites post it and say, look at this thing that Apple patented.
And at least at this point, most sites don't say, maybe this is coming soon.
They just say, look, Apple patents everything.
But I think this one...
it just goes to show all ideas are on the table when it comes to patenting things this is you can see it from the little picture here it's like a laptop uh but imagine that where the trackpad is someone someone took a router and routed out the trackpad you can't even do this on modern laptops because they're too thin but routed out the trackpad to the thickness and shape of a phone and instead of the trackpad dropped an iphone into there
And the idea is this would be like giving your iPhone a bigger screen and a physical keyboard, and then the iPhone would merely become a glass trackpad for the whole rest of the device.
So it's sort of turning your phone into a laptop in an even more bizarre way than turning your iPad into a laptop.
And in some respects, this doesn't strike me...
as entirely ridiculous the reason this is related to naked robotic core it's like look we'll give you the little skinny computing core and whatever you want to put around it is fine if you want to put a 13 inch screen and a physical keyboard around it sure go for it because the iphone is plenty fast and the the current top of the line iphone i believe is currently faster than the macbook right in in single threaded anyway probably in certain things yeah it's ram starved compared to the macbook but uh oh it's got half i guess it was just does the macbook have uh the macbook one have four gigs
It has eight.
All right.
We'll say it's still Ramstar.
But anyway, this idea that eventually phones will become powerful enough to do basic computing tasks and you can just carry that phone around with you.
And if you ever want a laptop, all you would do is snap your little naked robotic car phone into a laptop shaped thing and then sit down and, you know.
do a bunch of writing or bang out some email or do web browsing on a larger screen and then when you're done yank your phone out of the little router channel and snapshot the the the now lifeless corpse of a laptop that's probably a bad name for this product corpse and then go on your way with your phone i think that's actually kind of neat uh the problem of course being that i believe apple's laptops are now thinner than their phones at that part especially the macbook one so probably not going to happen it's just a silly patent but i like thinking about stuff like this
also i i don't know if i mean this this probably could change but if you feel if you put your iphone next to your trackpad and you feel them both the trackpad has a a more slippery finish because you're moving all over it up more often whereas the the glass on a phone is a little bit more of a tacky higher friction uh finish are you complaining about the thumb friction again
Yeah, and I'm not entirely sure that you could make a Surface that would feel good on both of those.
You'd make the back of the phone the capacitive touch thing.
Well, then why don't you just plug the phone to the side of the laptop like an optical drive?
One thing they don't answer in this diagram, I didn't read the patent, is how the phone would make a connection to the corpse shell.
Because if it goes straight down in, you can't have the... Does something come out and go into the lightning connector?
That little mechanical thing?
doesn't really make much sense to me but anyway it could be like an nes where you slide it in first and you push it down yeah but then you have then you have gaps johnny i would have to want it to be like seamless where it just you know well then you got to like take it out blow on it put it back in the power light blinks i'll blow it on it again don't blow it it's bad for your cards um did you ever see that thing with the uh it was like electrostatic cutting of metal where they will take a block of metal like a solid cube of metal and cut out like a cylinder shape in the middle of it
and do it with such precision and with such a small gap that if you take the cylinder and put it into the hole like you take them apart oh yeah you take the cylinder and put it into the hole it slowly slides down because like the world's tightest fit and when it finally slides down all the way you can't even see the line around it i love that stuff
All right.
Wow, we did well on follow-up.
Look at us.
Mostly because we moved half of this from follow-up to topics, but still.
Move the waffles down because now we're going to, yeah.
It's kind of cheating.
That's all right.
Well, I mean, I don't know.
I could have seen waffles go either way, but you want them to go lower, that's fine.
because technically speaking is in this never-ending chain of marco's laptop orders if it is eternally follow-up it just it just feels like he's he's like doing a combo chain in a fighting game that's going on way too long at a certain point you have to do anyone want to do the combo breaker noise i don't know reference maybe over your head anyway certain point you have to do a combo breaker that's what we're doing here uh marco is into the topic area talking about his delicious delicious waffles indeed so marco tell us about those waffles of yours
All right, yeah, so last episode I described my waffling where I finally decided that I really didn't like the 15-inch Touch Bar MacBook Pro, and I was ordering a 13-inch MacBook Escape to replace it, which, for those of you not familiar with my stupid names for things, is the low-end MacBook Pro, the 13-inch that does not have the Touch Bar, that has the real hardware Escape button, among other things.
Don't apologize for your names.
They're not stupid.
They're better than Apple's names.
Yeah, that's true.
The reason I came up with these stupid names is because Apple's names aren't useful.
Like when they first introduced the 12-inch MacBook, and they just said, this is the MacBook.
It's like, well, okay, there's already something called MacBook that everyone knew, and everything else is called MacBook Pro, and people kind of use the word MacBook to describe the whole lineup.
And yeah, so now they have this 13-inch MacBook Pro, which is quite different from the other computer named 13-inch MacBook Pro.
So anyway...
So I now have it.
I got it a few days ago.
I want to reserve final judgment for when I've had a chance to travel with it.
And that's fortunately happening in like a week because I haven't really tried pushing it yet.
Like I haven't tried travel with it yet and I haven't really pushed its hardware yet.
Although the photo analysis D is doing its job for, who knows, the next month.
I have no idea when it will complete because there's no progress meter, no way to pause it or suspend it or tell it what to do or tell it to please not analyze all the photos right now.
You can always re-nice it.
oh you know i didn't think well i think it's already running in in like a fairly low priority environment i know what the lowest number is anyway then it literally will never complete it's better you want to you might have to do the uh you know the race to sleep thing let it hurry up and finish
Yeah.
So at some point, that will calm down, hopefully before I leave for my trip.
But anyway, from just the experience of using it for a few days, from setting up all my software on it, and we'll get to one of the details of that in a little bit, I think.
But just from the experience of setting it up and using it that way for a while, and doing a few nights of casual stuff on it, like browsing the web and getting light work done, like email and stuff.
So far, I love it.
I absolutely love it.
And I never felt that way about the 15-inch.
I love the 15-inch Retina.
When that came out in 2012, I immediately loved it.
That machine was awesome for its time.
Still today is pretty awesome.
But when the 15 Touch Bar, when I first got it...
I never loved it.
I was just kind of thrown by all the different compromises and kind of sideways and backwards steps from the previous one.
This is basically a MacBook Air, but a modern day interpretation of it.
in in many ways you know it's the same weight i mean so is the other 13 inch with touch bar same weight a little bit smaller modern you know modern case design same intel processor family which has those awesome like 16 or 15 watt ish uh processors which i i've said before on this show are an amazing balance of speed versus portability like they're it's a really nice sweet spot and i'm really glad they're they're using these still
Because those are previously only using the MacBook Air and the low-end Mac Mini and I think even the cheapest 22-inch or 24-inch iMac that education buyers buy.
Anyway, so far, I absolutely love it.
The keyboard is the same as all the new keyboards.
I don't love the low-key travel.
I don't love how closely spaced all the keys are, which makes me make a few more mistakes than I usually do.
um the force tux trackpad is among force tux trackpads i have used i think it's probably the best one i still don't love force tux trackpads but this is the best one i've used thermally i think it's really nicely balanced it stays very cool and you hardly ever hear the fan no matter how hard it's working
When it's totally maxed out, you will hear the fan, but even then it's pretty quiet and it doesn't get very hot to the touch.
This is one thing I've noticed with all the new MacBook Pros.
When you compare to the previous generation, the Retina generation with the Haswell, when you compare the new Skylake ones to those, one thing you notice immediately, and I actually confirm this with Intel's Power Gadget thing or Power Widget, whatever they call it,
the cpus even when they're under load these new skylight processors don't usually hit their maximum thermal limits whereas the old ones would kind of like hit that like 45 watt or whatever they would like hit that wall and just kind of stay there the skylight kind of peeks at it here and there but it doesn't really stay at that maximum wattage for whatever reason and so when you're doing intensive things these new macbook pros are cooler to the touch and quieter than the previous generation
And this one is no exception to that.
It's very cool, very quiet.
That, to me, is very, very nice.
One other major advantage to it compared to the 15 is that because it doesn't have that discrete GPU, I don't have to babysit whether it's using that GPU by any programs or not when I'm trying to maximize battery life.
Because that's the thing with the 15 is like when the 15 is using that discrete GPU, your battery life gets slaughtered.
So you kind of if you're like a power user trying to like make sure you get the most battery life out of it, you kind of have to always be monitoring with some kind of utility or something like whether whether the discrete GPU is on or not.
And you kind of have to babysit it and maybe like make different app decisions like, oh, I guess I guess I can't run Chrome right now because I don't have enough power or whatever, you know, whatever the case may be.
This one, by not having a discrete GPU, it kind of keeps... The difference between the high thermal envelope and the low thermal envelope is a smaller range.
So you can worry less about battery life with this so far.
Now, again, I might modify that decision once I have a chance to travel with it.
But...
So far, this is awesome.
Now, also about the Touch Bar and Touch ID.
So I had the Touch Bar and Touch ID for a little while, for five months or whatever it's been.
I now don't have them anymore.
I don't miss the Touch Bar at all.
The very first time I wanted to adjust brightness and I had to hit a button a few times instead of sliding a thing, I thought, oh, I kind of missed the slider thing.
Then I immediately stopped.
I immediately forgot about it.
I don't miss the Touch Bar at all.
Touch ID, I thought I would miss a lot.
In practice, I do miss Touch ID, but I don't miss it as much as I thought I would because in practice, Touch ID on the 15 inch and the 13 touch bar is not always there when you want it.
And this is probably going to improve over time, I hope.
But there's a lot of system dialogues and things where they ask where you need to give it your password that Touch ID is offered for maybe a third of them that I've seen and not all of them.
And so you actually aren't using it all the time.
So I found that it is nice when it's offered to you, but that because it's offered so inconsistently, and sometimes there's a few bugs regarding Touch ID, especially at the login screen when you're waking it up from sleep, I find overall that I actually don't miss it as much as I expected I would.
Because in practice, while it sounds like it's going to be amazing, once you have it in practice, you realize, yeah, it's not quite there yet.
So this is another thing where like along with the touch bar, I think this would probably be good in a few years or at least better in a few years.
But for this current laptop generation, if you choose not to get the touch bar, I don't think you're missing that much.
Because Touch ID is still not all the way there yet.
And the Touch Bar itself, I think, is still a big question mark about whether it's really a net win or not.
And for me, for my usage personally and my preferences, your mileage may vary, but for my usage and preferences, I'm very happy without it.
I like having my hardware escape key back.
I like having all the buttons up top that are just buttons and they just work all the time.
I love not accidentally brushing it when I'm moving my hands around and accidentally turning the brightness way up or turning the speaker way down or something.
It is nice to... It's also just nice to have a kind of...
I know this is weird, but it's kind of like a simpler look.
The touch bar is actually kind of distracting, and it looks kind of gimmicky.
And so to have a nice, simpler, more pure look, if that makes sense, is a little bit more, I don't know, peaceful.
It's hard to really quantify these feelings, but...
overall i'm actually quite happy not having the touch bar and this machine in general uh i'm extremely happy with the only things i can say that that are downsides to it are what i mentioned last week which is the price is really not a great value for what you're getting although i guess you know how much is your happiness worth but you know like if you look at like specs you
By the specs and the power, and when you compare it to the previous generation of MacBook Air, which is still for sale because Apple, it's not a great value.
It is a lot more expensive than it was before.
And the configuration I got, which is basically everything maxed out except for the, I got 512 instead of a terabyte, is something like $2,200.
And for something that is not a 15-inch, that's a pretty high price.
That being said, I'm happier with it than my 15-inch.
So, you know, what does that say?
The other thing is, I remember when these first came out, we talked briefly in the show, there was a guy, I forget his name, he's a YouTuber that everyone else knows except us because we're not cool and we're too old to watch YouTube, I guess.
But there was a YouTuber who did a bunch of tests where plugging in certain things to the USB-C ports would make the Wi-Fi cut out on the new MacBook Pros.
And I think that was this model that he was testing because I think that was the only one that was available at that time.
I think I have a Wi-Fi problem.
In that sometimes, like as I was installing lots of stuff and downloading lots of stuff, sometimes all the internet connections would just stop working.
And until I turned off the Wi-Fi and turned it back on again.
And that happened like three times over a few days.
So I think I have a problem.
And I hope it doesn't apply to all of them.
And I'm not sure that's enough of a problem to actually get this repaired or replaced because I don't want to mess with that.
Everything else about it is perfect.
I love everything else about it.
Actually, I don't love the keyboard.
But relative to what we have today, relative to our choices today, this is great.
But...
I'm a little concerned about that Wi-Fi thing.
But otherwise, if that doesn't end up being a problem in practice most of the time, I would just tolerate it.
Because otherwise, this computer is awesome.
The 15-inch is great if you're doing... Casey, what you do, which is you have a work laptop that you take to and from work or that is your primary computer or your only computer...
If that's your situation, I think it does make sense for a lot of people to use the 15-inch because it is the most computer that you can get for a little over $2,000.
It is a great power system, and it's really nice in a lot of ways, and I used one for years.
There's a reason why I have waffled over time between the 13-inch and 15-inch size glasses because they're both great.
But for me right now, as a secondary computer that I use when traveling, right now I'm really happy with this 13-inch.
And you could point at this clip and laugh in four months or six months when I change my mind and say, I got to go back to the 15-inch.
This is not enough power or screen space or whatever.
Oh, that's being generous.
It's going to be four weeks.
well it took me like five months on this one but uh anyway so you know i might change my mind later i probably will that's just what i do i guess everyone other tech podcasters like they'll like try android phones for a month i do this i guess uh this is my thing but right now i'm extremely happy with this 13 inch macbook pro with no good name and uh yeah that's my review so far uh ask me again after i travel with it and try to actually do work on it but so far i'm very happy with it
That Wi-Fi thing has me worried.
Me too.
I don't like that.
Especially if I can't attribute a reason.
Do you have a 10-12-4 on it?
Yeah, a 10-12-4 from minute one.
It didn't come with it, but that was the first thing I did when I got it.
And when the Wi-Fi dropped, it was not plugged into anything.
so that is concerning the fact that this computer has now been out for six months and that is still happening suggests to me that this is a an inherent flaw with the design of this model that they're not going to fix until the next model comes out if you think it's a hardware thing then probably yeah but we will see i don't like this kind of problems i don't like them at all
Well, that's why you don't buy any computers ever.
That's very true.
My computer has no Wi-Fi problems because it doesn't have Wi-Fi.
Nailed it.
As it so happens, the 2008 Mac Pro that you have, that I used to have, is probably the computer I have had that had the fewest problems ever of any computer I've ever had.
So you happen to luck out with that one, but I think anything else you buy you're going to be disappointed.
same i mean so far the fingers crossed 5k imac is doing its thing without complaint oh my image retention is getting really bad really fast it's getting bad every time i do anything gray if i if i open up logic or if i view daring fireball i just see the immense shadows of everything that i was viewing before it's like me me playing zelda seeing those heart shadows
Yeah, it's bad.
You know what I did, Marco, to help fix that?
I'm really not trying to be snarky.
You know that, what is it, Ariel screensaver that we've all, I think, mentioned at some point?
The one with the Apple TV one?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Ariel is the name of the screensaver.
What I've done is I've put that on my 5K, which I've occasionally seen some image retention that has made me very unhappy.
I've set my Mac to run that screensaver for like an hour or two after I'm done with the computer and
so that you have something that is constantly moving and kind of getting me back to a known good state for all i know this is a darn placebo but as far as i can tell it has made my image retention way way way better why don't you try getting a screen with some technology that doesn't suffer from image retention uh john what you said to me last time i complained about my plasma
as you both complain about your lcds of an image good thing all that doesn't have these problems oh wait it does no i mean like in case like that you that wouldn't actually help my problem because my problem is not like i walked away for 10 minutes it's like as i'm using it like i i happen to have this one window open for an hour as i was working in it and then it moves like
like it's getting and you know an image retention is the kind of thing where like you know sometimes you have it like right at the beginning but usually like you know when the thing's brand new it doesn't have it and then if you're gonna if it's gonna be a problem like you won't notice it for a while and then all of a sudden it'll start being noticeable and then it gets it gets worse usually at an accelerating rate after that point
Someone who knows more about the chemistry and electronics of LCDs could probably tell us why this is a factor in these modern LG panels or whatever it is we're using and why, for example, I'm staring at the Apple 23-inch cinema display in aluminum case with white sides.
that has no image retention ever and is like the the the oldest thing ever like there must is again it's not just like oh lcd versus plaza versus whatever it's the particular screens and so maybe there's been something about modern screens and the way they're constructed and formulated or maybe just by a particular manufacturers that makes them so much more susceptible to image retention under
casual circumstances like again we've all seen like the the check-in kiosks at the airport that are just super burned in so like at a certain point if you show the same image on the screen 24 hours a day seven days a week except for brief periods of activity of course it's going to happen but you're just using your 5k iMac it's pretty light usage compared to an airport terminal you just say like i have daring fireball open for a second then i click to another window to go in front of it and i see the little star
embedded in the window or vice versa seeing no no it's the opposite it's like when you have a bunch of black and white windows up and then you load something gray like daring fireball or logic then you see shadows of every of all those black and white borders that were previously there yeah so and it's it's sticking around longer now than it did before too like i i had an entire podcast today uh like i edited under the radar today which just admittedly doesn't take me that long take me like 10 minutes to edit but like that entire 10 minute edit i had a shadow of the window behind it
yeah not not going away that's the other thing by the way like my plasma obviously it's worse on my plasma because when it does get there you're going to be waiting like a year for it to be entirely gone whereas image retention like my ipad 3 had pretty bad image retention too uh but as bad as it was and you could see it it was like three to five minutes and it would be 100 gone um and so that's preferable makes you feel like oh it's an annoyance but
but it's not like i have to wait a year for this to go away but anyway like didn't apple do a recall replace for image retention i think it was on the original retina 15 inch macbook pro right um there were certain i think it was certain ones mine wasn't even part of that like i had that original one it did have image retention and i i eventually got it fixed but it took a long time yeah one thing before before i forget um on the macbook escape screen you
It is a beautiful screen.
I absolutely love it.
And this is actually, so, you know, as I'm setting everything up new, one of the things I did, you know, I usually pick a background that's some photo I took recently that I like.
And the photo I picked for this one includes my son wearing a really bright, saturated orange jacket.
And I think this is the P3 color gamut helping me out here because this very saturated orange color just looks incredible on this screen.
This is the first screen I've ever seen that makes my first-gen 5K iMac screen look less good by comparison.
Every other previous Retina laptop looked worse to me.
This one looks awesome.
Now, that being said, the same thing probably applies to the 15-inch.
I'd use a different picture for the wallpaper on that one.
So the same thing probably applies to the new 15.
But just to point out, even on this one, which is basically the new MacBook Air, the previous MacBook Air used a crap screen to save cost and space and whatever else.
the MacBook escape today is amazing.
It is an awesome screen.
And to have that on what is, you know, the low end model, even though it's still not a good value, but it is in the lineup.
It is the low end model.
Um, to have that is really, really nice.
And I'm, I'm extremely happy.
I can't, I can't overstate how happy I am right now with this purchase, even though the wifi doesn't always work.
Apparently.
So as someone who is considering getting a MacBook one, which as far as I know is a MacBook adorable, right?
Somebody put in the show notes, MacBook one versus that after you.
Okay.
Well, you're freaking me out here because I always use them interchangeably and I got nervous that I had misunderstood.
So anyway, so as someone who's considering a MacBook adorable slash MacBook one,
So remind me again what it was that brought you to this instead of a MacBook One.
Obviously power, but what else was it?
It was when I put them both side-by-side in the Apple Store on the table, and I played with them for a while, because I went in on a weekday where nobody was there.
So when I had some time with both side-by-side, and also thinking back to when I did briefly buy a 12-inch MacBook One, the
Basically, the main difference to me is just the way they feel, the ergonomics of using them, that the 12-inch size is really small, and in certain ways, that actually makes it less comfortable, for me at least.
And again, your mileage may vary, but for me...
The general operation of it, like where to place your hands, opening and closing it, all these things.
It was pleasant at how small and light it was, but when it came time to actually put it down, open it up, use it, type on it, put it in your lap, I found the 13-inch size worked better for me and was more comfortable.
I also found a dramatic difference in the trackpad click.
That's a huge... If you put it side by side, do it in a store, put them side by side, the trackpad difference is extremely noticeable.
And there is still a keyboard difference as well.
I don't know how long the keyboard difference will be there.
I'm assuming that the next MacBook 12-inch update will bring the keyboard parity there.
But right now, there's still a keyboard difference.
And it's not a massive difference, but the 13-inch is just better.
And so in all those ways, the physical ergonomics...
The 13-inch is 50% heavier.
It is noticeable how much heavier it is than the 12-inch.
But it's still a really small... It's a 13-inch MacBook Air in weight.
It's still a really thin and light computer.
It is still really compact.
It does perform better, but I don't think the performance difference is that big.
It does have two USB-C ports instead of one.
That's still not a lot, but two is better than one.
And there are going to be situations in which I'm going to be really happy I have that second port and that having the one would have been a pain.
I do think the screen is higher quality.
I have not looked up to see if anything backs this up or if this is just placebo, but I think the screen is higher quality than 13.
And in various size classes of things we use...
You can look at the iPad line, for instance, and the reaction for most people, myself included, is that when we picked up that 12-inch iPad Pro, when you're using it as a laptop, that's cool, but when you have to pick it up and hold it in your hand as an iPad, that's a little bit too big for most people.
Similarly, when you pick up the iPad Mini, that's fine for a lot of people, but for a lot of people, that's like, you know, this is a little small.
I like something a little bit bigger.
And it turns out that 9.7 is a really good size for a device that you use and hold and carry like an iPad.
Similarly with phones, you see like a lot of people like the really big ones, but most people stick with the medium sized ones and the small ones are still very well liked.
And so it seems like around the size of the 4.7 inch iPhone is probably like the ideal size right now for phones for most people.
And I think you can look at laptops and you see kind of a similar thing.
All these perceptions of what's an ideal size are generally related to how big are average people and how do you hold things?
What do you carry?
How do you carry it?
How are your hands shaped and where do they go?
And I think in the world of laptops...
We had bigger ones in the past.
We had like the 17-inch, and that was a massive aircraft carrier.
It was awesome when you were using that giant screen, but it was really unwieldy to carry around and use.
So that was kind of deemed by the market and eventually by Apple.
You know what?
That's too big.
And the 15 is now the high-end, and I think in the world of laptops, I would say 13-inch is really the sweet spot of like...
This is the best size for most people.
And I think sales back that up because in the last, you know, however many years that the MacBook Air has been a thing, I would guess the 13-inch MacBook Air was Apple's number one selling computer for a very long time.
It might still be because education buys a ton of them.
The 13-inch MacBook Air is an amazing balance of size, portability, cost even.
But talking about physical stuff only for a minute, it's a really great balance.
And this is just the sequel to that, right?
The MacBook 1 slash adorable slash 12-inch, it is smaller and lighter.
And if your number one goal is to be able to carry this with as little weight as possible, or...
to be able to actually wear one in your jacket, which is amazing.
If your number one goal is get it as small as possible, then yeah, go for that one.
But if instead you're looking for more of an all-arounder, the best laptop in general for most people most of the time, or the one that's most comfortable to use most of the time, I would say the 13-inch is the better balance of that.
I would also say that the screen size on the 13-inch is great.
And that I don't want a smaller screen than this.
Fair enough.
All right.
Well, I appreciate it.
I still feel like I want me a MacBook adorable.
But everything you just said makes perfect sense.
It's just I think because I want to basically have a iPad that you can actually do things on.
Hi, Mike.
That's why I want the adorable.
Oh, you're going to hear about that.
Oh, I'm going to pay for that later.
We are sponsored this week by Audible with an unmatched selection of audiobooks, original audio shows, news, comedy, and more.
Get a free 30-day trial at audible.com slash ATP.
If you want to listen to it, Audible has it.
You can listen to audiobooks from virtually every genre, anytime, anywhere.
You can play them on phones, tablets, computers, even devices like e-readers and iPods if you still have an iPod.
Audible's audiobooks are great for long flights, long road trips, or even your daily commute.
You might think you don't have a lot of time to read books every year, but you'd be surprised how many audiobooks you can hear if you just put them into these everyday spots like your commute or road trips or doing chores around the house.
You'd be amazed how much time that adds up to.
And audiobooks bring books to life.
Many of them are read by the authors themselves, which adds a really extra dimension to the text.
And you can take risks with Audible.
You could try new authors.
You could take risks on content because they offer a great listen guarantee.
So if you start an audiobook and you don't like it, you can exchange it for another one for free.
So see all this yourself.
When you begin your free 30-day trial at Audible, you get your first audiobook for free.
And there's no stress or obligation because you can cancel your membership whenever you want.
So with audiobooks and spoken word products, you will find what you're looking for.
Get a free 30-day trial by signing up at audible.com slash ATP.
That's audible.com slash ATP.
Thanks to Audible for sponsoring our show.
So what is the deal with whoever put in the show notes MacBook One versus MacBook Adorable?
We touched on it before.
I just wanted to bring it back around.
These are two names for the 12-inch MacBook that Apple just calls MacBook that has one USB-C port slash power plug on the side.
And another name that it is known by, and again, the reason people make up these names is not just to be cute, but also because
We need something to distinguish it because MacBook is not, you know, unique enough.
Is MacBook adorable?
That's a name invented by another podcast where they talk about sneakers and plane crashes as far as I'm not a tech podcast.
Actually, by the way, I'm pretty sure that was on Cortex, not Hello Internet.
So that was not the sneakers and plane crash podcast.
That was the productivity email software podcast.
It's a stretch.
Yeah.
email i'll give you email yeah i'm pretty sure ccp gray invented that name for for it on cortex right and macbook one marco invented right on on the show yeah all right so and our chat room and i both collaborated on macbook escape yes um macbook one versus macbook adorable
we are using them both interchangeably on the show and i was thinking about it about uh which name if we should settle on a name or what's going to happen there and unfortunately i think i think slash hope that macbook adorable is going to have more longevity not necessarily because it's a better name but because as soon as they add a second usbc port to the 12 inch macbook
macbook one doesn't have doesn't doesn't make sense anymore in fact it becomes undistinguishing because we we would need we're gonna have to call it macbook two or something and then that's kind of confusing um but whereas adorable if it's still very small it is still adorable macbook adorable lasts until they come up with a new macbook that is entirely different form factor that is as thin as a sheet of paper and
And then it probably comes up with a new name.
So it seems to me that in the long run, MacBook Adorable will stand triumphant over the, again, the corpse of that laptop line when that day comes.
Well, I mean, and also, like, I've even stopped saying MacBook One most of the time because, Nat, like, the reason I...
started saying that name in the first place was similar to my reason now for saying MacBook Escape for this 13-inch because Apple's name for it was vague and ambiguous when you would use it in conversation.
And that computer has now been out for over two years.
So I feel like now we can just say MacBook, and most of the time that will now suffice.
People will usually know what we mean now.
And if not, I've been saying 12-inch MacBook, which really clarifies it.
And so I think the need for alternative names for that product has now mostly or entirely passed because it's just been long enough.
The MacBook Escape, I think, still needs clever names like that, but that will probably expire in like a year as well.
Yeah, once they get rid of those darn pesky physical keys and put the touch bar on everything, right?
Oh, God.
I'll hold on to this forever.
The funny thing is I train myself into using caps lock for escape everywhere, and I'm still doing that now.
You're allowed to.
You're still allowed to do that.
And now you can use both now, because when you remap Caps Lock to escape, the escape key still does escape.
And so I'm able to use both now, but Caps Lock is so much bigger and closer to my pinky.
So there it is.
So really you're just biding time until the touch bar makes it to everything.
You're basically pulling a John.
Yeah, when the Touch Bar makes it to everything, if that's going to be a thing, which it probably will eventually, I'm not going to throw a huge fit over it.
The main reason I like this computer is that it has the MacBook Air CPU class and a massive battery in a really, really good size and weight package.
The 13-inch with Touch Bar...
is only different in a few of those factors like it still is the same size and weight I would probably be very happy with that one as well but it has worse battery life and the touch bar has these downsides for me that I don't love so for me that's kind of a minor feature difference if there comes a time when I can only get the model I want with a touch bar I'll do it it'll be you know I won't love it but it'll be fine
So since we've recorded, I believe, yeah, because it was Monday, Apple has opened WWDC lottery.
So the way it works is as of two or three years ago now, you put your name in a hat.
And if you are lucky enough to win a lottery, really big hat.
A really big hat.
If you're lucky enough to win the lottery, you have won the opportunity and you will take that opportunity.
That's the way it works.
But you have won the opportunity to give Apple $1,600 of your money and you will get a ticket to WWDC in return.
So the lottery started this past Monday and it runs, I believe, until Friday afternoon, evening, something like that.
And then presumably shortly thereafter, they will start telling people whether or not they have made it in.
First question, before we go any further, is the obvious question.
Who put their name in the hat?
I can tell you that I did.
I have listened to Under the Radar, so I know your answer, Marco, but why don't you share with the group, please?
Sure.
I mean, Under the Radar this week, I go into detail, but the summary of it is that this is the first year since 2009 that I am not seeking a ticket.
And that's not because I think it's bad or anything.
It's simply because I have found in the last couple of years that my utility of the conference is going down because I've just been to so many, it gets a little repetitive after a while.
If you're a first timer or if you've only been a couple of times and you're still getting a lot out of each time, by all means, go for it.
But for me, I've just found that I have gone so much
And it really is geared significantly towards newcomers, because usually about half or more of their attendees are first-timers.
So if you go every single year, it starts getting a little bit less necessary for you.
So this year, I've decided to focus instead on the surrounding events.
I'm going to the Layers Conference, which I highly recommend, and I'll be around stuff like that.
But I'm
I decided this year to forego the official conference, but I will be out there and I hope to see all of you there as well.
John, I put my name in the ring again.
I really like WWDC.
Still, I would also like to go to layers.
I'm not sure if I could swing both of them.
Obviously, I can't be physically in two places at once, but it's also, you know, an added expense to pay for both of them.
Let me tell you, as somebody who did that, you can't.
You just can't.
I mean, the advantage of the layers is only, I think, the first three days or two days.
And so you could at least go to WWDC for the last two or three days.
But I did that two years ago, and it was a huge waste.
It was...
It was a huge waste of both passes, really.
I felt bad that I like I had to miss like half of layers and a good chunk of WBDC.
You could try to try to go to things from both.
So I would not recommend doing WBDC with another conference.
But if you don't get a ticket to that or if you'd rather would not go to that, I do recommend layers as an alternative conference.
Yeah, so if I don't get a ticket to WWDC, I will probably try to get a ticket to layers just so I have some reason to actually travel out there and don't get yelled at, pay you too for not coming.
Wait, so you're going to come?
Oh, I am so happy right now, John.
This is the best.
Oh, I never thought you'd come.
This is great.
Yeah, me neither.
Well, I would come if I got layers.
If I didn't get tickets to anything, then we're back to maybe not so much.
That needs to be somebody's text or ringtone.
But anyway, no, that's fantastic news.
I assumed that if you did not get a WWDC ticket, that that was that.
The story is over.
Then we will not be seeing you this year.
But that's fantastic.
If I just come for Layers, I would probably also not be there for the same amount of time because Layers is only three days.
So I would basically come back earlier, and that would hopefully reduce the expenses of everything all around.
Yeah.
if you weren't there you wouldn't get a chance to see this year's version of my podcast recording setup because it changes every year dramatically so oh man that's funny we're gonna have lav mics this year is that what's happening i was actually thinking about uh headsets i'm looking i'm doing some research to see like are there any headsets that sound decent because that would allow me to pack a lot less stuff overall
yeah oh my word turns out microphone stands are massive in your suitcase i had to pay the overweight limit on my on my checked bag last year it was full of like microphone stands and stuff so yeah trying to trying to reduce that a little bit this year we'll see
So I did put my name in the hat, and I cannot agree more that Layers is unbelievably good.
We know at least one of the women that run it, Jessie Char, works with us.
And she is fantastic and amazing.
And the conference, unsurprisingly, is fantastic and amazing.
Layers is, if you've ever been to another tech conference before...
you will immediately recognize that Layers is a conference designed and run by people who have been to a lot of other tech conferences and have put a ton of thought and consideration and effort into fixing and addressing the things that everyone actually wants and needs when they go to a tech conference.
And so you go there and there's like, you know, it's a really nice schedule.
It's not like too packed.
The talks aren't too long.
There's lots of socialization time between things.
There's amazing snacks and coffee right there in the room.
And hot chocolate.
yeah there's like and there's like there's like advil in case you like drank too much the night before or whatever like it's like it's they really they think of everything that you want out of a tech conference even if you don't realize that because they did think about it they did realize it and they planned for it it's just awesome
So I wrote a review of Layers shortly after I left last year, and I'll put the link in the show notes, but it begins as follows.
Layers is the fantasy conference we all wish existed but are too scared or preoccupied or wimpy to put together.
And I stand by that a year later.
Layers is really fantastic.
It is not an also-ran to WWDC.
It is equally as good.
So definitely check that out if you can.
I highly recommend it.
And Jesse is really awesome.
Yeah.
That is a genuine and honest quasi-advertisement from all of us because we really like it that much.
We were sponsored this week by Betterment.
Investing made better.
Go to betterment.com slash ATP to learn more.
Betterment is a smarter way to invest your money, providing investing advice through smart technology, automated investing and human advisors.
They've changed the industry by using the same strategies that financial advisors use with clients who have millions of dollars, but now available to everyone, including smart rebalancing, global diversification, tax efficient investment strategies and more.
Betterment's mission is to help you manage and grow your investments to build your financial future, all with low fees, so you lose less of your money along the way.
If you do the math, typical investment fees and costs really add up over time, and Betterment's fees are a fraction of the cost of other financial services.
Betterment's so easy to use that they've won awards for their customer experience.
You can log into a demo account right on their website if you want to see it for yourself.
Investing involves risk.
For a limited time, sign up for Betterment, and you may qualify for a free Canary home security system to help secure your home.
For terms and conditions, visit betterment.com slash ATP.
That's betterment.com slash ATP.
Betterment.
Investing made better.
Anyway, there are some interesting changes to WWDC this year, other than the obvious relocation to San Jose, which I keep calling San Diego in conversation because my youngest brother lives in San Diego and I keep getting confused.
It's the same, right?
Yeah, they're like next to each other.
So if I do that later, just like John said the other day, just fill in what I meant.
But anyway.
Like last year, Apple is to some degree, I don't know if I should go so far as to say embracing, but perhaps acknowledging that there are other things that are happening at the same time.
So on the WWDC site, there's a page called Beyond WWDC.
And the header there reads, in addition to Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, a variety of other exciting developer events will take place throughout the week in San Jose.
And they mention, among other things, layers.
Alt Conf, which I've never actually gone to, but I've heard very good things about.
This year, Cocoa Conf, which I've gone to a couple of them, they're doing what they're calling Cocoa Conf Next Door, which is, I guess, either literally or figuratively next door to WWDC.
Oh, it looks like it is literally next door to WWDC.
There's the Beard Bash talk show with John Gruber and James Dempsey and the Breakpoints, which gets a special call out because that's a benefit concert for App Camp for Girls, which is a organization that is near and dear to our hearts.
So you should definitely check that out if you happen to be in town.
And I think that's really cool that Apple is really starting to, again, if not embrace, at least acknowledge that there are other things going on at the same time.
I know it happened last year, but I'm happy to see it back this year.
Additionally, there has been a...
A couple of really fascinating brand new changes to the WWDC site, which I am genuinely really excited about.
The first is something that we all got really, really crotchety about last year, and I think deservedly so.
There's a code of conduct.
It is quite short, but as someone who is not a good reader of these things, it seems to cover most bases, I say, with little conviction.
But it looked fine to me.
I don't know.
Did you guys have any thoughts on the Code of Conduct?
It's typical Apple writing, like, get right to the point, cover all the bases.
Because the longer you make it and the more complicated it is, the more it seems like it's some kind of weird legalese that's Apple trying to cover its butt versus what it's supposed to be, which is a thing that expresses the expectations of guests.
If you come to this, here's how you're expected to behave.
If you're here and people don't comply with this, then you know and everybody knows it's explicitly against the rules and here's what you do about it.
right and so that's all that's what people were asking for and like the the resistance to code of conduct was always kind of you know essentially organizations as personified by whoever you want to put as the the head of the organization getting defensive like what are you trying to say like everybody's nice at our things right why do we have to have a code of conduct they don't do anything anyway bad people are just going to do bad things why have laws people will just break them and you know just goes around their house like oh geez just look and
If everyone agrees that there's an expectation of behavior, just write it down.
And then write down what to do if something happens against the thing that you all think we agree on, right?
And then actually follow through with it.
And if something does happen and someone does report it, then you will actually go and remedy the situation rather than trying to sweep it under the carpet.
That part can't be in the code of conduct, but it is the presumption, assuming that we think Apple is, you know...
really behind us and i think they are behind it and i think last year they were just caught unaware by this and probably like lawyers had to get involved and so on and so forth they just had to get on the same page with everybody else like this is a thing that you should have it is the baseline for any kind of conference uh and now apple's on the same page with the rest of the civilized world saying you know here's our code of conduct it is straightforward it is the thing that we all think we all agree that we all believe in uh but now we've written it down
Yep.
So I'm really happy to see that there because there would have been hell to pay and deservedly so had they ignored it for this year.
Yeah.
It's kind of amazing.
They didn't already have one in previous years, honestly, but it is good to see now.
I mean, like I said, I think it's because like just the kind of agreement of like,
look everything's fine we're all friends here everyone's cool like like there was there was already a code of conduct not written down implicit because if you came to wwc and started acting like a hooligan in a way that was visible to everybody you would get kicked out and apple would point to some legally that says look we reserve the right to kick you out whenever the hell we want and here's where you're being disruptive but
Right.
Right.
Right.
things are going to happen we have to have a policy about it founded in something not just to let it be not just let it fall to whoever happens to be there to take the complaint at the time have something in writing on the front page of the thing is this is how it's supposed to work so that if something does go down you can say look this is in violation of you know you that everyone understands and everyone agrees both the people who could potentially perpetrate these kind of things and the people who are victims of them feel like that apple is behind that like they're they're they're
writing down what they say is supposed to be rather than just saying i bet we're all nice and everything will be fine and we'll just get along right that's that's not a that's not a workable system in this day and age certainly not and uh not to turn this into the layers love lounge but uh the layers code of conduct has emoji everywhere which means which immediately means i'm paying very close attention to it so uh here again layers knows what's up
The other thing that is really exciting about the WWDC changes for this year is they are offering childcare.
And the entire passage reads as follows.
Group childcare will be available free of charge for children eight years old or younger and will be provided by corporate kids.
Make sure to include your need for childcare during ticket registration as space is limited.
That is super awesome.
It's super awesome even for somebody like me.
I don't think I'm going to take them up on this, and certainly I didn't enroll in it when I put my name in the ring.
But if hypothetically we wanted to, the three of us, Aaron and Declan and myself, go out to San Francisco for the week and...
Aaron wanted to have five minutes to herself at any point I could bring Declan to WWDC and have him play with all the other kids and Aaron could go sightsee and I could learn and everyone is happy and so even for somebody like us this is awesome imagine how freaking amazing this is for somebody who is say a single parent or perhaps just a caregiver for whatever reason like there's a million and seven different ways why this is amazing and I'm I was not expecting this I was expecting a code of conduct I was not expecting this and this is awesome
so i i applaud apple for both of these moves i think they're they're perhaps overdue but still i'm really really stoked about both of them yep agreed yeah we all pay a lot of money for these tickets like they you know six hundred dollars per person you can do the math um and apple has to decide how to allocate that money obviously they pay for the space and they pay for you know safety and security and they pay to set up all the stuff in there and like i honestly i don't know if wwc is a profit center or not i imagine it would have to
at least break even or something but who knows but either way they have to decide how to allocate their money and in the grand scheme of things like when you're trying to decide what will make what will make our conference better so you can like layers like you know a conference made by people have been to a bunch of other conferences and i found like these are the things that annoy me and these are the things that i wish existed
this is one of those things that can can fundamentally change the experience of the conference or just make it feasible for for a whole set of people and if you have to trade that versus some of casey's beloved ottawa like that's that's a reasonable trade because there's lots of there's lots of other places where you could spend this money right let's not get too aggressive john let's not take my ottawa
yeah just bring back strawberry sea monster that's all i ask a lot of people like you're allergic to bananas right a lot of people allergic to the strawberries well yeah so have some variety don't have every flavor have banana in it there is they make one that doesn't it's very popular and they used to have it until like two years ago the struggle is real
That type of thing is actually surprisingly expensive, and especially since space is limited.
Offering this as a service, as an amenity, as a thing that comes as part of your $1,600, I'm sure the people who are taking advantage of it would gladly trade for a bunch of extra danishes that just go stale because nobody eats them or whatever.
The costs of a thing like this are surprisingly high, even for something like those silly stale danishes you eat.
If you knew exactly how much each one of those costs in the grand scheme of things, once you add it all up,
Well, the secret to the stale danishes is that every year there is one type of danish that they serve in the breakfast platter that actually is really good.
So it's kind of a sport to find out the one good one every year.
Can you find it out by Tuesday morning?
Then you can have great breakfast the rest of the week.
They're all pretty good.
Any of the ones with the fruit jam in the middle, I'd say they're pretty good.
Blueberries, pineapple, apple, all those are good.
I give those all a thumbs up.
You can basically live on those if you try real hard.
See, now I'm regretting not getting a ticket this year because I'm going to miss all the stale danishes.
And because they're going to be new stale danishes because it's going to be a different venue.
I'll give you a play-by-play of the terrible box lunches.
That's one place where they don't...
where they don't put the money.
$1,600 is not going, which I'm all for because there are plenty of other good places where you can get food for a reasonable price around there, but there are not places where you can drop off your child and have them be close to you for a reasonable amount of money during WWDC.
So this is a wise allocation of resources.
This is exactly the type of thing that can make
The conference, again, not just like a more pleasant experience for some people, but just like just plain possible for people who previously couldn't even entertain the idea of going.
Exactly.
Yeah, this is super great.
And I said it before, but I'll say it one more time.
I'm super excited that these are the moves that Apple's making in a year where...
I think the three of us have had a couple of complaints.
This is 100%.
This is 100%.
I can't say two thumbs up because I'm only one person.
We got scolded about that once.
But I will give a single thumb up because that's all I'm permitted to do.
Don't allow that scolding.
You have two thumbs.
Who's got two thumbs?
This guy.
So anyway, yeah, I am really stoked about this.
And I am hopeful.
hopefully going to see John there.
And then I'll be jealous of what Marco says at layers, or maybe I'll be with Marco layers who, who even knows, but we'll figure it out one way or the other.
But I am, I am already trying not to get my hopes up for the big John Syracuse, a hug that I always forget how tall you are and that I have to reach up and get on my tippy toes to give you a proper hug.
And I'm already looking forward to that awkward moment.
Get ready, John.
I'm coming for you.
My body is ready.
Yeah.
I love you.
I love you so much, John Syracuse.
Oh, my God.
That's amazing.
Thanks to our three sponsors this week.
Betterment, Audible, and Backblaze.
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.
Cause 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-N-G Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Tech Podcast So long
so i'm trying somebody asked for a picture of the box lunches in the chat and i am the kind of moron that pictures don't do them justice well they are not terribly tasty but i think you're overblowing how they are i'm gonna put this in the notes it's for next week i i there i need to go into detail about what what really goes wrong with these lunches not today but i'll do you want to just do that now
No, because we're going to talk about Zelda, so I'm not cutting into my Zelda time.
Hey!
Hey!
Speaking of the devil, hello!
Don't want to cut into your Zelda time, John.
Yeah, he wanted me to expound on WWDC lunches, but I'm saving it for next week.
Oh, that's good.
Yeah, Zelda time's better.
Yeah, that's probably true.
I do have tons of pictures of food from the beer bash, coincidentally, but I have yet to find one of the box lunches.
This is going to bother me.
And anyway, hi Tiff, how are you?
Hi, how are you guys?
I'm doing well.
Oh, I see a picture of Odwalla.
All right, I'll keep myself under control.
Anyway, tell me about Zelda and how much I should regret not having picked up the Switch.
All right, so far, Zelda's excellent, as John said.
It is...
I don't know if you would like it Casey because I'm not quite sure you like huge epic sandbox games where you pick through things and find stuff and walk around and gather and fight here and there.
So quick background, I did play through the entirety of Ocarina of Time, which is not exactly the same, but I loved that game.
Okay.
So I played about five to ten minutes of Breath of the Wild on my sister-in-law's Switch, and then I played another five or ten minutes on my friend's Switch, my friend's and neighbor's Switch.
So I've got probably a sum total of 15 minutes of play time on this game.
And from what I experienced in the brief window of time, I did like it.
The reason I haven't bought myself a Switch other than being cheap is because I fear that I would either play through Zelda and then decide, okay, well, that's enough.
Or I will play through some of Zelda and then just give up on it, to Tiff's point.
So I'm not really sure how I would feel about this, but...
in the brief window of time i played it i really liked it have you ever played fable no never even heard of it he's never heard of fable anyway um it's a lot like fable right john don't you think don't you feel the fabley vibe going on i feel so much fable i never played fable but i'm aware of the game and i know what i know what it's like there's xbox get off my podcast it's on a microsoft console so john would not have any of that yeah
But it's Fable.
But I know about Fable.
But yeah, it is... For Casey's taste, Ocarina of Time is definitely much more linear and follows a formula, and it's a good formula, but Breath of the Wild is not that.
Breath of the Wild definitely brings in the big sandbox.
And for people who know the terminology, when you say a sandbox game, it's the idea that instead of having like... It's hard to talk about without making references to other games like Uncharted or whatever, but instead of having an expected series of steps...
like you're gonna do this then you're gonna do that then you're gonna do that and this is how you're gonna play through the game to the ending of the game maybe multiple endings or whatever instead it provides you like a sandbox like on a playground where it's just this big square and it's got sand and toys and trucks in it and you can do you know and there is like a story to be had and solved but a lot of the game is just playing in the sandbox i'm gonna make a little castle over here i'm gonna drive my truck over there and it is what you make of it and that type of game can be like
uh you know i don't get it what's the point what am i even supposed to do this is boring if you're not into sandbox type games or if you just try to play it linearly like i'm confused about where to go and this game doesn't seem to have much stuff in it i played through the story too quickly but if you like sandbox games and you like collecting things and you like picking up new items and finding new places to go and doing stuff
This Zelda is amazing because it has a lot of the same traditional Zelda elements of the overarching story and all the things you can do.
But unlike so many past games, it's not like go here, do this dungeon, get the boomerang, which you will need to finish this dungeon.
The next dungeon, you get this item and do that like that.
It doesn't do that at all.
You can go wherever the hell you want, including running to the final battle as soon as you get out of the first little tutorial area and getting your butt kicked because you can't beat it at that point.
um to just like spending the entire game like i wonder how many people will play breath of the wild and literally never finish the main story because just playing the rest of the game is more fun just slowly methodically exploring the sandbox exploring the map collecting things getting new outfits uh catching new horses just that can entertain you for such an incredible period of time and so i love both those type of things and this is a great hybrid game for me i'm really enjoying it both aspects of the story part and the sandbox part
So you should totally play Fable because the dynamics and everything in this game, in the new Zelda, is exactly like Fable.
It's like you're not constantly searching out.
In old Zeldas, I skipped a couple, so correct me if it changed, but you find one weapon and then you slowly upgrade it throughout the course of the game.
Like, oh, then you find the next weapon.
And there's like six weapons, right?
Or six main swords that you're searching for.
it's more of like you get a sword and you use it for a while and then it breaks and then you find another sword you use it for a while and then it breaks and so there's no like oh now i have to search for the master sword and get all these things in order to get the master sword it doesn't seem like that kind of thing it's so much it's so like fable there's little people walking around that you can trade with and get a pet dog if you want wolf but same thing
yeah well that's in fable too like everything that's what i'm saying i know it's so fabley it's crazy fabley wait you can get dogs in zelda well a wolf well but but a dog i accidentally ran over a fox just recently oh and it was so sad it turned into he turns into food it turned into meat but i ran over it with my horse so it was an accident yeah how far i don't want to spoil things how far are you in the game
um i'm talking to the um old wise lady and running some errands for her how have you do any major story elements that you have progressed that you think would be markers towards completion i don't want to again i want to spoil um i'm up to like the the silly camera dynamic just
All right.
And how much of the map have you unlocked percentage-wise?
I haven't unlocked much.
It's not showing me a lot, but I've been wandering all over the place.
How many towers, basically?
Oh, I don't know.
Maybe like 11 or 12?
11 towers?
I mean, they're really tall things that when you unlock them, they reveal a new portion of the map.
None of those yet.
I've only been playing for like two days.
Zero?
I mean, obviously you've done the first one, right?
You got off the Great Plateau.
Yes.
Yes, and then after that, you get off the Great Bot Tower and you go to that tower and it reveals the first section of the map.
So that's one tower right there.
The very, very tall ones that you have to climb up, right?
Yeah, I haven't done those yet.
I didn't even try climbing them.
The ones that are lit up?
Yeah.
All right.
I already spoiled something for you.
All right.
You are not far into this game at all.
And I think you're the type of person who may get lost in just like, you know, finding items.
I've just been doing the little temples and finding chickens.
Like, I don't know.
I'm busy.
I'm busy finding horses.
I wanted to make sure I got a teal one with dots on its butt.
I was very specific.
The horses I find a little frustrating.
And speaking of the wolf pets, that's the one thing that annoys me about this.
How do I get a wolf pet?
I'm very excited about this part because I just keep running over foxes.
Step one, don't run them over.
Well, I'm sorry.
It was an accident.
I felt really bad because the foxes are super cute.
As long as you eat them, use every part of the fox.
I did.
I did.
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
So one monetary thing that Nintendo has been using recently that's very frustrating is they want you to buy their little Amiibo plastic toys.
And then the little plastic toys, because they have a little NFC thing on them that you hold up to the controller or whatever, unlock stuff in the game, which annoys me because it's an additional thing you have to buy.
But as someone who's willing to spend lots of money on games,
whatever what really annoys me is you can't buy them because nobody has them unless you want to go on ebay it's like nintendo make more of this plastic crap so i can buy it i'm ready to give you an unseemly amount of money for amiibo plastic toys just so i can take the little nfc thing and bop it on my controller and get the in-game items of the gift because they give some good items in this game now i have the amiibo from like the special edition wind waker hd version gave you the wolf link amiibo
um and if you use the wolf link amiibo uh you get the wolf companion in this game he just appears oh yeah i'm gonna need marco i'm gonna need that but yeah so marco if you find an amiibo connection let me know too because i've been trying to buy these you should you just go online you can see this amiibo gives you this this amiibo gives you that so just get the amiibos that give you the things that you want adam's gonna be so into that adam's gonna be crazy he he was really he wants to play he wants to play a lot like he wants to walk around link and he was telling marco how to play
someone needs to it was kind of incredible yeah he was he was he he wanted to teach me how to play the game and so i walk over and he's like all right that stick you move that that one you move and this one you look like he he already figured out like like the dual analog stick movement and looking thing that is you know standard in all first person games most adults can't figure that out for a while and he's four and he was explaining it to me as if i didn't know it's pretty great
the the thing about the wolf uh link uh amiibo thing is that depending on how well you do did in a portion of the wind waker hd game it that influences what kind of health your wolf has when you instantiate him in breath of the wild which is kind of fun and a nice connection between those two games you get a default amount if you haven't played the previous one but yeah the amiibo angle is a little bit annoying you don't need them to finish the game or anything but i want some of the items they give not the wolf but i want some other things and i i can't find the amiibos in stores or online anywhere except for
ridiculous prices on ebay so that is frustrating but so no wait hold on so you're what you just said is that the the state of a like an npc in the prior zelda is carried over into the zelda so one of your achievements is a particular dungeon that you do and and when you complete a certain section of the dungeon how many hearts you have left uh translates to how many hearts the wolf link has when you instantiate him in the new game it's just like a little nfc tap pad thingy it's not it's not super high tech
so like if we've never heard of these things and never done anything do we get like like a slow emotionally damaged wolf or like do we get like a good one everything's the same about him he'll probably just have a little bit less health than mine or maybe a lot less but either way like if he dies you can i think he has a cooldown and you can just reinstantiate him he's honestly not that particularly useful because like any sort of npc fighting aid type of thing it's
You know, it helps a little bit, but then a lot of time you just spend worrying around.
Same thing with the horses, by the way.
Horses, I'm worried.
I don't want to spoil things for you.
But anyway, I was worried.
I had some problems with my horse companions as well.
So I'm mostly a loner out there.
what was your problem i don't want to spoil anything for you just play the game oh also i've been feeling factory i've been feeling super bad poor horses i've been feeling super bad about breaking things in the village even though i know it's part of the game to like find stuff no you got it was tradition you got to break those pots you see you see pots you they need to be broken no
But I feel really bad because now it feels like so personal because they're like they're like people and they're walking around and they kind of talk to you more.
One of them might have money in it.
I mean, it could happen.
No, I just I feel I feel really guilty now about like taking fruit out of shrines.
And I just I can't.
I'm feeling really guilty about this game.
Are you really saving this kingdom?
I don't know, but I'm feeling like it's a mix between Fable and I'm worried about going to the bad side.
I have all these... I'm panicked.
That's not going to happen.
But it's revenge of the old mechanics because in past Zeldas, I was the scourge of grass everywhere, as every player who's played a Zelda was.
Oh, as everyone has ever been.
If you see grass, it must be cut.
You know why?
Because sometimes when you cut grass, money pops out.
or hearts but mostly money and so then you're like grass must cut it and what does this game do it gives you gigantic fields of grass and weapons that wear down when you cut with them and you're like must cut grass but must not cut grass and there's some pottery must break pots but but but no don't break pots because it will wear what if i pick up the pottery and throw it but then the people will be angry at me and the game has lots of in-game text that
teases you about previous Zelda games mechanics when you do one of the things from it's, it's a lot of fun.
At least they kept those cute little leaf dudes.
I'm super happy about that.
Oh, the Koroks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're cool.
I'm liking that.
I see a lot of the older game creatures kind of in this world also.
And like the ones from, um, Wind Waker, right.
You know, they're all over the place, the same kind of demon D things.
And yeah,
yeah yeah wind wake wind waker is wind wake i don't know what's it called wind waker is the the boat one yeah yeah you've got you got the octorocks you know all the way back to the first game yep you have those yeah there's so much so good the main thing that i'm enjoying about this game um and it's not just the sandboxing lots of games are sandboxy but this is not i mean because you know you know grand theft auto or whatever is a sandbox game right but this is like the title is appropriate breath of the wild the the main sort of theme of this game and it's embodied in both the mechanics and in you know
the, the sandbox nature of it is that you are out in the wild.
And so it's not, it's not entirely man versus nature, but there's a lot of that from the very beginning of the game, just getting hot and getting cold.
But in general, just like wanting to see what's over the next rise and wanting to see, uh,
you know the the sense of exploration like what's going to be over there or what could that be or whatever and as a couple people pointed out in discussions on twitter uh so many sandboxy games like uh even things like very popular games like oblivion or the elder scrolls series and stuff like that there were sandbox games with huge worlds very detailed all sorts of stuff you'd see something i wonder what's over that peak that looks like a little interesting valley over there
And you'd spend your time making this long trek to this distant peak, which is cool.
You can do it in a sandbox game.
If you can see it, you can go there.
And you would just go and work your way there.
And there's random encounters with enemies.
And you go through some villages.
And you take a break and get some food or whatever.
And you finally make it to what you think is this really cool little nook or waterfall.
And there is nothing there.
Like, it is just some more textures and scenery.
And the thing that Breath of the Wild does so well is that...
Even though it is a huge world, it is obviously a huge world that humans have carefully constructed so that if something looks tempting or interesting, when you get there, there will be something there.
Not the world's greatest thing, but some reason for you to have arrived there, some reward for getting there, and that the most interesting things are in areas that look interesting that will lure you toward them.
And it makes you feel like...
I'm a genius for finding this thing here.
It's like, no, you're not.
They made it look cool and inviting.
They made it say, I wonder what that is off in the distance.
That looks kind of interesting.
Or there's like a little twinkle or, or that looks like it would be a neat little cove or have a nice little tree or just looks like, I mean, maybe we're sensing that like there are certain sections of it that are more massaged by human hands than others.
But the idea of like, it just continues.
Come on.
It just,
it continues to amaze me that like even just when areas are mapped out you look on the map and they give areas names like little regions names and you're like that's an interesting name or they put a little thing on the map like a little drawing on the map like that looks cool and you go there and like recently i had a big ordeal getting to a particular section of the map and i'm playing with my son and he's like
dad you know it was very difficult to get there and we were using a lot of our food and it was like just why are we even going here just turn back we're using up all of our food and this is a waste of time and we've been trying to do this like a harrowing journey through you know elemental dangers and random enemies and you know my son is getting bored or whatever but i'm like no i really want to get to that part because just because it looked interesting on the map like i didn't actually see it with my own eyeballs
And when we got there, it was totally worth it.
And he had to admit, like, that was a good idea.
And why did they put this out here in the corner of the map that it's super duper hard to get to?
Because they knew people would just try to get there to see what that thing is.
And when they get there, they are rewarded.
And that is the number one thing that I love about this game.
The sense of exploration and adventure and the fact that every time I go exploring or on some, you know, damn fool crusade, as they would say, in a movie that Marco and Casey will not remember.
Nope.
Nope.
I'm rewarded for that at the end.
So I envy your largely unlocked map.
All the places you will go, which there you go, you'll remember that one.
All the places you will go in Zelda still.
So much to see, so much to do, so much fun.
Well, that's good to know that it's worth it because I've climbed some mountains and it was pretty good up there.
You know, like I blew up some rocks and stuff, but I've definitely...
was able to climb a lot more mountains than i have been in other sandbox games you know usually it's like oh yeah you can climb this mountain but you really can't sorry that's climbing is big yeah so i'm pretty excited that you can go climb every mountain forward every stream that's right follow every okay everyone okay maria okay river no your name is maria come on someone's gotta be able to sing this nope you nope until you find your dream thank you you're welcome
I don't even know what song you're thinking of.
Oh my gosh.
You don't.
I'm sure I do know it, but darned if I could place it based just on the lyrics.
I always have to remember that Tiff married into this family and she is not genetically doomed to not know anything about pop culture like Marco is.
So I can talk to her on the level of the rest of the normal people and she'll get my references.
That's why we are Team Strong Island, John.
Oh, my God.
All right.
So is there anything else on Zelda?
Like, I'm not trying to shut you guys up.
I just I have nothing I can contribute to this conversation anymore.
So it is quite a big epic game, as John was just describing.
And I feel like if you aren't ready to get into that, or that doesn't appeal to you, then buying a system just for this game probably wouldn't be a great idea.
Oh, no, no, no.
I think if I were to buy a Switch, I would probably get Zelda because I expect I would like it.
But really, the system would just be a glorified Mario Kart delivery system, which is probably preposterous since my understanding is the whatever version of Mario Kart that ends up on the Switch is not going to be too terribly different than what's on the Wii U.
But you never played the Wii U one, so it's all new to you.
Exactly.
Also, you know, I think some of this comes from me just getting bowled over by seeing in the, like, Switch trailer or whatever you want to call it that came out in, like, October when they showed, and I think it was a basketball game that they were showing, but they showed, like,
a couple of people playing the same game on one switch which i thought was really clever but even more clever was when they had like a series of switches um or switch i or whatever around like in a circle and in in the the implication was that they were all linked together somehow and they're all playing the same game across like six different switches which i just thought looked amazing and so i'm having this vision of like me and my sister-in-law getting our you know getting the family together and being able to like
play Mario Kart across two different Switches against each other, with each other, what have you.
And gosh, only knows if that'll even be supported.
But that's the dream, man.
And it just looks awesome.
I think your hesitation on the Switch makes sense if the idea of getting into this giant fantasy world game is not massively pushing you to buy it.
Because like...
I bought it because I had a good opportunity to, and there were a couple games on the roadmap that I'm excited about, like Mario Kart.
And you also buy everything.
And that as well.
But I bought it because there was other stuff like Mario Kart on the roadmap that I want.
And I bought Zelda thinking that, you know, everyone says this is an amazing game, so maybe I should try it, even though I traditionally do not like games like this.
I mean, and your son was Zelda for Halloween.
I mean, not Zelda.
Sorry.
Oh my gosh, I did it.
Ah, he was Link for Halloween.
You're fine.
You're fine.
You made the outfit.
You're allowed to one slip.
Yeah.
Oh, and Splatoon.
Splatoon is supposed to be really good.
I've never ever played that ever, ever, ever.
So I would probably pick that up in my hypothetical world where I have a Switch.
Right.
And so basically, if you are like me and if Zelda is not like the massive thing that you absolutely must do because you love games like this, then this is not the right time to buy a Switch because there's very little else out right now.
I played that Fast RMX or something like that.
It's the Wipeout clone.
It's cool.
It's a decent game.
It's not amazing.
It isn't that different from the AG Drive series on iOS.
It's pretty much the same thing, but more expensive.
Did you buy Snipperclips?
I downloaded the demo.
I haven't launched it yet, but I guess I'll try that next.
Try that.
You and Adam try that together.
He'll show you how to play.
Okay.
But yeah, I think seeing Zelda, seeing Tiff play it and seeing she and Adam enjoy it a lot and that's great.
It's very nice and cute to watch.
But boy, am I glad that I didn't play it because I would be miserable.
It is so not my kind of game.
And even though I can respect how much everyone else seems to say how good it is,
If you're not into that kind of game, I don't think this is going to sway you.
So all this is to say that I'm sure glad that Tiff is playing this thing that I stupidly bought.
And Casey, if you are on the fence about whether Zelda is a big driver for you to buy it, I'd say you're safe to wait.
Hey, John, do you have those little puppy stickers?
uh in oh for the for the controller like a little side slide thingies no i do not have the puppy face sticker oh i don't use that controller i just use the pro controller it doesn't matter i put the sticker on it just sits on the table it looks super cute it looks like a little messed up puppy it's with its eyes all jacked up i have an extra if you want it i'm betting he doesn't you do yeah i'm not big i'm putting stickers on my electronics not sure if you've heard
No, this is like a legit, like it's different.
This is different, John.
It's different.
So like one of those static vinyl stickers that doesn't actually leave any sticky stuff and can come off cleanly at any time.
It'll be fine.
Just put it on.
You put stickers on your keyboard though, didn't you?
Me?
No, I only have a tiny little sticker.
No, it's an overlay for like the Photoshop keyboard, but it's like a rubber thing you just like pick up.
And it just traps all the dirt underneath it.
So when you pick it up, it's so horrifying.
You just put it right back down.
Is the dishwasher safe?
i don't know i don't know it's never been cleaned i don't know no we just replace it every three years or so yeah when it starts like deteriorating and ripping from hand oils oh my god this is getting gross run away yeah i wish uh marco you should you should watch tiff plays even though you're not into playing she's gonna get it up to some she's gonna get up to some business eventually he fell asleep you should just check out what she gets up to yeah you can fall asleep while you watch that i fell asleep within like the first five minutes i
maybe maybe tiff needs to involve you more and like when she has a couple of projects in the works that she can explain to you what it is that she's doing you can get into it or at least you could be a navigator and like decide where you're going to go together and you as a family can travel to far off places you can look for the arrow twinkle no this see this adam plays this role very very well as like the co-pilot to tiff as she plays i am not good at this i just fall asleep and lose interest
Although he's getting super useful now because when I have to go to the bathroom, I'm like, here, you drive for a while.
And he walks around and picks up some stuff.
Come back and you're in the middle of a lake.
Yeah, it's fine.
He got our horse lost for a little while.
What did you name your horse?
Horse names are an important thing in this game.
Okay.
He named the first horse... I can't remember.
Arby?
No, he just made it up some word that starts with an M. Anyway, the horse that I'm driving right now is named Arby.
Like the restaurant?
Yeah.
I don't know.
He thinks that only legitimate words start with A, like his name, so he picked RV.
System works.
And he also thinks that any string of characters that starts with A is a real word.
Yep.
Yeah.
Well, for names, that kind of works.
Oh, Menina?
Menina.
I think that that's what he named the first horse.
I don't know.
You might have to alternate naming rights for horses if it's going to continue like this, because you won't be able to keep them straight.
Yeah, well, I only have three so far.
The first two we picked out were crap, but they're in the stable anyway.
And the third one's pretty good.
Arby's reliable.
He's a good horse.
He's a good horse, John.
Cool.
Well, thank you, Tiff, for swinging by and dropping some knowledge, as usual.
All right.
Dropping the fierce knowledge on the video games.
I had to go back to Zelda.
Goodbye.