Nobody Cares But Me, But I Do Care

Episode 233 • Released August 6, 2017 • Speakers detected

Episode 233 artwork
00:00:00 Casey: So you use the, it's a 15-inch?
00:00:02 Casey: No, you have the Escape with the 5K, and the Escape is clamshelled.
00:00:08 Marco: Close.
00:00:08 Marco: It's back to a 15, remember?
00:00:09 Marco: I know I make it hard to keep track.
00:00:12 Marco: I can't keep track.
00:00:13 Marco: Holy shit.
00:00:14 Casey: Okay, so wait, so you're on a 15 touch bar.
00:00:16 Marco: I'm on a 15 Touch Bar, which I never actually used the Touch Bar.
00:00:20 Casey: And that was because of all the ports.
00:00:21 Marco: It was partially because of the ports, and it was partially because I tried the first few weekends I was spending here.
00:00:26 Marco: I used the MacBook Escape with the 5K, and it was struggling to drive all those pixels.
00:00:34 Marco: Basic operations like window dragging was slow, and I did want more performance if it was going to be my main computer for a month of heavy iOS development.
00:00:44 Marco: Then I rationalize it away by saying, well, then when I go home, I can bring the LG 5K and I can sell my iMac while it is still under any kind of warranty.
00:00:54 Marco: I think it's under warranty until October.
00:00:57 Marco: And then use my clamshell with this setup I have now as my main setup until the Mac Pro comes out next year.
00:01:04 Casey: So I have appropriated a second 4K monitor, which is a story that's not worth telling at the moment.
00:01:11 Casey: So I have two of these LG 4K monitors that are now being run off of my pre-Touch Bar MacBook Pro.
00:01:22 Casey: And to be honest, it actually seems just fine with these.
00:01:26 Casey: Now, granted, they're 4K, not 5K.
00:01:28 Casey: It's a big difference.
00:01:28 Casey: But it seems just fine with two 4Ks.
00:01:31 Casey: However, I have forgotten how persnickety and fickle macOS is when it comes to clamshell mode.
00:01:39 Casey: Because there are lots of times that I'll, like, I put it to sleep and I open it up and it's furious and sometimes doesn't wake up.
00:01:46 Casey: I don't put it to sleep and I just rip all the cables out and I walk away and it goes to sleep and then may or may not wake up.
00:01:53 Casey: Or I'll open the lid and I'll rip all the cables out.
00:01:56 Casey: Then everything just dances all over the place and then it may or may not actually be the way I want it to be.
00:02:01 Casey: It's...
00:02:02 Casey: Clamshell is not really what we should be doing with these things, which is unfortunate because I do like it when I have either a 5K as you have or a couple of 4Ks like I have.
00:02:12 Marco: And I'll tell you what, as I've been using Clamshell here at vacation times, I completely agree.
00:02:18 Marco: It's been a while since I've used just a laptop with a desktop screen connected to it.
00:02:25 Marco: I used to do that all the time.
00:02:26 Marco: It used to be on my main setup.
00:02:28 Marco: But that was probably a good six, seven years ago at least.
00:02:31 Marco: And I had forgotten like quite how just inconsistent a lot of the stuff is like it just it doesn't work right.
00:02:38 Marco: And that now with the touch bar, it's even worse.
00:02:40 Marco: Like every time I log in, the text box won't show on the main screen.
00:02:45 Marco: I have to start typing because it's the laptop is waiting for touch ID, but it's closed.
00:02:50 Marco: And so on the big LG screen, it just shows me a login window and it will not show the text area unless you start typing.
00:02:57 Marco: It's just like weird little stuff like that.
00:02:58 Marco: It's just not good.
00:03:01 Marco: I really honestly – I'm rethinking my plan now of like getting rid of my iMac early.
00:03:06 Marco: I'm like, oh, God, this is awkward.
00:03:09 Marco: Not to mention like this LG screen is such a piece of crap.
00:03:12 Marco: is it really i read about it before like it's not i mean so one thing is i had to get an ergotron arm because the stand is so wobbly it just kept wobbling like every time i would like type on my keyboard i don't think i'm that aggressive of a typist but every time i would type on the keyboard
00:03:29 Marco: my monitor would wobble back and forth.
00:03:31 Marco: But yeah, the LG is, it's, it's a piece of crap.
00:03:34 Marco: It's just, it's not a good, it's, it's a PC monitor.
00:03:38 Marco: It has crap speakers.
00:03:39 Marco: It has crap frame around it.
00:03:40 Marco: It's, you know, it had that stupid interference problem with the early ones.
00:03:44 Marco: Like it's just not a well engineered piece of anything.
00:03:46 Marco: And I, I, I don't expect to be buying more non-Apple monitors there if I can help it.
00:03:55 Casey: All right, so this is a weird setup for tonight.
00:03:58 Casey: It is currently the evening of Friday, the 4th of August, and we are going to do a marathon recording session, and we need to get this week's, which probably won't be released until tomorrow on the 5th, Saturday, the 5th of August, this week's recording, which will probably be a mostly normal ATP recording.
00:04:18 Casey: And next week's, which will be released on or around Wednesday the 9th, we are going to do a bit of Q&A, probably for most of what ends up being the second episode.
00:04:31 Casey: But we are recording these both back to back, and we may or may not have a clean separation between the first episode and the second, depending on how aggressive Marco gets when he does the splicing and dicing.
00:04:44 Casey: I have so many ideas.
00:04:46 Casey: Oh, I can only imagine it.
00:04:47 Marco: I'm thinking like, so my two favorite ideas are either we do like, you know, next week on ATP, like one of those like previous, or we do like the classic cop out of like, I don't know how to end this song in the 80s.
00:05:01 Marco: So I'm just going to fade it out.
00:05:04 Marco: We'll just be repeating the same sentence over and over again and just slowly fade, fade, fade it out.
00:05:10 John: Way to spoil your two best ideas.
00:05:11 John: I hope you don't put this in the episode.
00:05:16 Casey: Oh, it's so true.
00:05:17 Casey: So anyway, so this one, it might feel, this one and the next one, I should say, might feel slightly weird, and I apologize if that's the case.
00:05:24 Casey: Like we had mentioned, I think, on the last episode, between the three of us, we have planned our vacations to not overlap at all, which is kind of unfortunate for times when you want to make sure all three of you are here to record.
00:05:37 Casey: So...
00:05:38 Casey: We're doing the best we can, and we apologize, and thanks for bearing with us.
00:05:41 Casey: That being said, John, how was your beach vacation?
00:05:45 John: It's fine.
00:05:47 Casey: Good talk.
00:05:47 Casey: All right, let's start with some follow-up.
00:05:50 John: Wow.
00:05:51 Casey: That is the most John answer I could have imagined.
00:05:55 Marco: That was actually slightly more upbeat than I would have guessed.
00:06:00 Casey: So let's talk about TSMC's 10 nanometers versus Intel's 10 nanometers.
00:06:06 Casey: Okay.
00:06:06 Casey: And we had somebody in the know write in and that person said, you know, I work for one of the companies involved and they might be biased, but I like the show.
00:06:17 Casey: This is this person talking.
00:06:18 Casey: And I just wanted to point out that like so many other things in technology, naming of process nodes has become more marketing than reality.
00:06:25 Casey: So there's an article that talks about this, and one of the recent tricks, continues this anonymous emailer, one of the recent tricks is to quote a distance between features that are not electrically active.
00:06:35 Casey: So this allows you to quote a small number, but of course doesn't do much for increasing transistor density.
00:06:40 Casey: And another person, Julian Heatherbell, wrote in to say that TSMC's 10 nanometers is only a bit denser than Intel's 14.
00:06:49 Casey: So Intel claims a three year advantage on 10 nanometers and wants to redefine everything.
00:06:54 Casey: We have another post about that and yet another post, which we'll put in the show notes about how Intel may still be set to lose process leadership after next year.
00:07:03 John: You're in a race?
00:07:04 John: You're in a hurry?
00:07:04 John: You got somewhere to be?
00:07:05 John: We got two episodes to fill here.
00:07:06 John: You're like, whoa, we got to slide through this follow-up as fast as we can.
00:07:09 John: You should stretch it out.
00:07:10 John: You know the TV stretch-out motion?
00:07:12 John: Looks like you're pulling taffy.
00:07:13 John: Do you know that one?
00:07:14 John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:07:14 John: You're doing the opposite.
00:07:15 John: You're doing the fingers rotating.
00:07:17 Casey: Bring it together.
00:07:18 Casey: Yeah, yeah.
00:07:18 Casey: Get it together.
00:07:19 Casey: Hurry it up.
00:07:19 John: Do we really need to try hard to stretch out follow-up?
00:07:22 John: Apparently, we do because Casey's going for a speed run again.
00:07:25 John: Let me just put a bow on this whole section of follow-up.
00:07:28 John: There will be three links in the show notes if you want to read more about this.
00:07:31 John: But the upshot is that a lot, a lot of people wrote us to say,
00:07:33 John: uh hey intel 10 nanometer isn't going to be way smaller than tsmc nanometer 10 nanometer and there's a lot of reasons for that and uh feature size is not very strictly defined as this a couple of emailers pointed out you know you can quote unquote cheat by quoting distances that aren't meaningful or quoting distances that make your particular arrangement uh
00:07:54 John: look good because again these are when they're laying out the things on the chips it's a 3d arrangement of things there's a layering vertical horizontal you know it's three-dimensional it's not just like even though it's done with uh you know lithography it's not just two-dimensional like a drawing it's actually a 3d shape and it influences what the distances are between things anyway it's complicated but consensus was from all the different feedback and all the different articles that
00:08:16 John: uh tsmc 10 nanometer is not as small as intel 10 nanometer and intel still has a lead and that final link is like well maybe they have lead now but they're gonna lose it in 2019 and later and i guess we'll see that was still fairly quick thank you very much
00:08:31 Casey: just saying but you're right we should stretch it out so steven dean wrote in to say i can't i can't even continue with this i thought you were struggling to pronounce his name no no no i'm like wow that was an easy one steven dean that that one's really difficult uh so steven wrote in to say you're missing a lot of your movie sound without a subwoofer your atoms uh only go down to about 86 hertz
00:08:57 Casey: which is normal cutoff for a non-full range.
00:09:00 Casey: Can you translate that into English for me?
00:09:02 Marco: Yeah, so basically, you know, speakers, because they are these giant moving things and everything, there's a certain frequency range that they're able to reproduce.
00:09:09 Marco: And what he's saying is that the low end of the frequency range of the woofers that are in my Paradigm Atom speakers, they can't reproduce very, very, very low frequencies.
00:09:22 Marco: Yeah.
00:09:22 Marco: And subwoofers have a lower floor.
00:09:24 Marco: They can reproduce frequencies much lower.
00:09:27 Marco: And that is certainly one reason to have a subwoofer.
00:09:32 Marco: I think a better reason to have a subwoofer is to get more bass energy.
00:09:37 Marco: You can get more of that thump, more of that slam, and bass hits and sounds and stuff.
00:09:44 Marco: And you can also just get more volume and more spread.
00:09:46 Marco: That's probably the better reason to have it, honestly.
00:09:49 Marco: But my reasons for not liking subwoofers and not really wanting one remain.
00:09:54 Marco: I designed my TV speaker setup to be really good for music in a way that still is okay for TV.
00:10:02 Marco: And I think for music, I still largely prefer two speakers, not surround, and for that to be not with some big, booming, thumpy subwoofer in the corner of the room.
00:10:16 Marco: Now, I know there are ways to do it better.
00:10:19 Marco: However, the arrangement of my living room is such that I don't really have a good place to put a subwoofer or maybe even a pair of subwoofers that would make any sense and that would sound good.
00:10:31 Marco: So lots of people have written in saying, you can put the subwoofer in good places.
00:10:35 Marco: There are more ways to do it than what I said last time.
00:10:40 Marco: And that is true, you know, in an ideal world, but my living room is not an ideal world.
00:10:45 Marco: And so I have limitations of, you know, what I can put where, how much space I have in the current arrangement, how things need to look, because we don't want everything to just be this giant box.
00:10:58 Marco: So, you know, my setup is fine for me.
00:11:01 Marco: And if you want subwoofers in your setup, or if you want surround set on your setup, cool.
00:11:06 Marco: I don't really mind either way.
00:11:08 John: I don't know how the setup is good for music if you're giving up 20 to 86 hertz, that entire frequency range.
00:11:13 John: That's present in music, too.
00:11:15 John: It's not just movies with explosions that have it.
00:11:17 John: I mean, all the things about volume, obviously, yeah, maybe you want that exaggerated in a movie, but just plain old music.
00:11:21 John: Music has bass, too.
00:11:22 John: I know you don't like bass usually in your headphone reviews, but you're missing out on part of the spectrum.
00:11:28 Marco: I don't like when bass is all you hear.
00:11:31 Marco: and and so while again i agree that it would be nice to have you know solid response across the whole frequency range in practice that's harder it's easy it's way easier doing headphones than it is in speakers uh headphones you only have one driver and you can you know you can do a lot of easier things with it but you know the speakers you have to have like large things that depend on the arrangement of your room and and large boxes and large transducers of some kind that vibrate up and down and
00:11:59 John: get a HomePod.
00:12:00 John: It'll figure out how your room is arranged to make sure everything sounds okay.
00:12:03 Marco: I'm actually really curious to hear how the HomePod deals with bass.
00:12:08 Marco: Because it's one of those things, it's kind of like how it's hard for very, very small camera sensors to do things that require big glass.
00:12:17 Marco: bass reproduction is one of those things where like at some point you kind of just need largeness like you need you need like a large surface to vibrate slowly to get some of that you know and and so it's very very hard for any kind of very small speaker to have good bass response that's why once the trend moved in computer speakers and then later in home theater speakers once the trend moved to very very small speakers they also had to add subwoofers
00:12:45 Marco: Because the little tiny speakers can reproduce the higher frequencies just fine.
00:12:49 Marco: But then they need to add a subwoofer to get the low frequencies.
00:12:52 Marco: And there was no way to make like a small speaker that could also do the low frequencies.
00:12:57 Marco: So the Amazon Echo definitely has this problem where the bass on it is non-existent.
00:13:02 Marco: Although the sound quality isn't very good anyway on it.
00:13:04 Marco: So maybe they just don't care.
00:13:05 Marco: But the HomePod, I would imagine they're going to care a lot about sound quality.
00:13:10 Marco: So I am really curious to see how they solve that problem, if they solve that problem, or if they just crank up the bass in DSP within the speaker, like artificially inflate the little bit of bass they have, and just hope that's enough and call it a day.
00:13:27 John: What was the biggest driver in the HomePod?
00:13:28 John: It was like four inches or six inches or something?
00:13:31 John: I don't know.
00:13:32 John: I should look that up.
00:13:33 John: Six inches is pretty big.
00:13:35 John: The whole thing is not that big, so we know it's not bigger than the pod itself.
00:13:39 John: Actually, it's a pretty small little thing, but yeah, it can't be that big of a speaker in there.
00:13:43 John: It's kind of a shame that, you know, this is a question I had about them, and I still have, although I think it's mostly been answered.
00:13:48 John: If you buy two of them like they recommend, it's not as if they act like stereo speakers.
00:13:52 John: It seems like they both just...
00:13:54 John: figure out how to best fill the room with sound but each one of them it's not like one is the left speaker and one is the right and similarly one is wasn't doesn't just become the sub you know what i mean like imagine if one could just do the low frequencies and it looks like a little sub or for anybody looks like the jellyfish but apparently they don't work that way
00:14:10 Casey: When we were living in Connecticut, so this is when I was in high school, and Dad had decided that he wanted to take his home theater really seriously.
00:14:22 Casey: And so not only did we have some subwoofer somewhere in the corner of the room, but he actually installed, I believe the term was bass shakers, or at least maybe that's a brand, like a Xerox thing.
00:14:32 Casey: What is that, a proprietary eponym or whatever it is?
00:14:35 Casey: But anyways...
00:14:35 Casey: Basically, under the floor of the room, the TV room, there were a handful of basically vibrator motors like you would find in your phone, just much bigger.
00:14:44 Casey: And they were wired into like the amplifier and acted as like ancillary subwoofers.
00:14:49 Casey: So you would literally feel explosions when you were watching movies.
00:14:52 Casey: It was pretty cool at the time.
00:14:53 John: Magic fingers, right?
00:14:54 Casey: I'm sure that's a reference, and I don't get it, but I'm just going to roll with it.
00:14:58 John: These terms all sound really gross.
00:15:00 John: Yeah.
00:15:01 John: In the modern parlance, it's the local furniture store that has an IMAX theater.
00:15:06 John: This is a normal thing if you are from where I'm from.
00:15:09 John: Oh, my God.
00:15:09 John: It has a thing called butt kickers.
00:15:12 John: Yeah, it sounds similar.
00:15:13 John: Yeah, I only hear they call them butt kickers.
00:15:17 John: There's a literal thing in everybody's seat that shakes you.
00:15:19 John: It's...
00:15:20 John: It's novel.
00:15:21 Casey: It is novel.
00:15:22 Casey: That's well put.
00:15:23 Casey: Also, Marco, I want to commend you for being okay with not perfection.
00:15:27 Casey: Because I completely agree with you.
00:15:28 Casey: Like, it is unequivocally not perfection to not have a subwoofer.
00:15:33 Casey: And to be okay with that is kind of freeing.
00:15:37 Casey: It's like, yeah, this isn't the best it could possibly be.
00:15:39 Casey: Okay.
00:15:39 Marco: again it's the living room setup right like first of all that is mostly not you know it's mostly used for tv i still wanted to sound very good for music but it honestly is mostly used for tv and and it sounds very good enough for tv for us and like i even ran this by tiff like when we started having all this all these discussions and everyone's telling us you gotta you have to get a center channel you have to get a center channel you can't you can't use the stereo mix it's terrible like i asked him like hey you want to do all this stuff it'll apparently sound better he's like no that's it just no and and i'm like okay really i don't either so i don't even know why i'm asking so
00:16:09 Marco: There you go.
00:16:10 Marco: No, we don't want it.
00:16:11 Marco: But yeah, I do understand it would be better.
00:16:13 Marco: But there are different factors here also, like how we want it to look, how we actually use it, how we actually live.
00:16:20 Marco: So that's different.
00:16:21 Marco: When it comes to my headphones, on the other hand... Right, right.
00:16:25 Marco: I actually recently bought a second pair of my awesome best headphones in the world headphones, the Hi-Fi Man 8G6, because they were discontinued a couple years ago, and you can't get them anymore.
00:16:38 Marco: So I actually bought a used pair on a forum that was in really brand new condition, basically.
00:16:42 Marco: And so now I have a backup of those.
00:16:43 Marco: And of course, I brought one here.
00:16:45 Marco: So because we're in the middle of a huge run of new fish shows, I'm not going to listen to that on my crap headphones.
00:16:52 Marco: I want to listen to those on my awesome headphones.
00:16:55 Marco: So here I am.
00:16:55 Marco: Right.
00:16:57 John: Right.
00:16:58 John: In the middle of a huge run of fish shows.
00:17:00 John: Before you finish that sentence, it's like, are the fish spawning?
00:17:03 John: Are they coming up onto the shore and leaping into your house?
00:17:06 John: Like, no, no, P.H.,
00:17:07 John: of course well yeah well only one of them is good but is this the thing that happens is like the weather like during the summer that's when the fish shows come well yeah actually oh my goodness like the christmas island crabs they just crawl across the landscape and lo there was fish surely you know the am i getting the reference christmas island crabs am i getting that right do you know what i'm talking about you're actually us
00:17:34 Casey: Yeah, you're asking the wrong persons.
00:17:36 Casey: Person, persons, peoples.
00:17:38 John: I think people is the word.
00:17:40 John: Crabs.
00:17:40 John: If you have never Googled Christmas Island crabs, you need to do that after whatever.
00:17:45 John: Pause the show.
00:17:46 John: Google Christmas Island crabs.
00:17:47 John: You should watch the videos and look at some of the pictures.
00:17:51 John: Then come back.
00:17:52 John: oh my god you have to keep doing the show oh my god what is what is going on why are they doing this that's when the fish comes and that's the representation of gigabytes of live music of songs that never end oh my god there's waves and waves of these things that's your waves is a very good song there's like three lyrics and just there's a lot of guitar
00:18:17 John: Oh, my God.
00:18:18 John: Yeah.
00:18:19 John: Got your meat stick right here.
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00:20:09 Casey: We got a lot of people, a lot of lot, a lot of people right in with opinions about bicycles.
00:20:19 Casey: Who knew that so many people who listen to the show had opinions about bicycles, but there are a lot of people that do.
00:20:26 Casey: One of the things that was striking to me, and I wasn't really paying close attention to the feedback to this because, quite frankly, I don't care.
00:20:32 Casey: However, a ton of people wrote in to say that Isla Bikes, that's I-S-L-A, which is apparently a U.K.
00:20:41 Casey: company.
00:20:42 Casey: So this is www.islabikes.co.uk.
00:20:45 Casey: And they have a U.S.
00:20:47 Casey: distributor somewhere, I think in Portland, because Portland or somewhere in thereabouts.
00:20:52 Casey: Of course it's in Portland.
00:20:53 Casey: Yeah.
00:20:53 Casey: Right, exactly.
00:20:54 Casey: So anyways, almost unanimously, almost everyone who rode in said, oh, you should get an Isla bike.
00:21:00 Casey: They're the best.
00:21:01 Casey: They're expensive, but they're the best.
00:21:02 Casey: So I actually took a note that when Declan is of age, we need to look at these Isla bikes because there was not a single person that said...
00:21:09 Casey: oh, don't get an Isla, they're overrated, blah, blah, blah.
00:21:12 Casey: No, everyone said get them.
00:21:14 Casey: So we'll put a link in the show notes to their UK-based website.
00:21:18 Casey: And then what is this video that I presume John put in?
00:21:20 John: Oh, that was just that pronunciation video that I thought was cute.
00:21:23 John: We did get tons of suggestions.
00:21:24 John: At first, when they first started coming in, I'm like, boy, we'll have lots of links to the show notes.
00:21:27 John: I'll put links to all these people's recommended bike manufacturers.
00:21:30 John: But then there were just too many.
00:21:31 John: Like, there were just too many things.
00:21:32 John: So it's by, we just went with majority rules.
00:21:35 John: Isle of Bikes got the most recommendations.
00:21:38 John: Second most recommendations was Wombikes, W-O-O-M, bikes.com.
00:21:43 John: I think they have a U.S.
00:21:44 John: location because the URL I have here is us.wombikes.com.
00:21:47 John: There were a ton of other places.
00:21:50 John: These are both obscure.
00:21:51 John: Some people are recommending less obscure things like REI and Specialized.
00:21:56 John: um but a lot of you know anyway bottom line is people are finding bikes that they find satisfying uh and but we'll just put these two links in if you're looking for ones that had the majority of parents and or bike nerds recommending them it was these two yeah well and and there were there were a ton of bike recommendations uh for what i should get like not just what i should get for my son but also what i should get i think what i've what i've decided and this is based on not actually writing any of these yet
00:22:24 Marco: What I want is very, very low maintenance and simplicity.
00:22:27 Marco: So I basically came down to a few things that became... Things that I really consider requirements that end up ruling out most of what people recommend.
00:22:36 Marco: Also preferences.
00:22:37 Marco: So because I'm like...
00:22:39 Marco: Doing most of my riding in a beach town, for instance, I wanted like two inch tires, not the little skinny one inch ones that are better for like going fast on roads.
00:22:47 Marco: I want big two inch ones so that it's more comfortable.
00:22:50 Marco: It's better, you know, better if I like have to go on the edge of one of the walks and go into a little packed sand for a second.
00:22:56 Marco: I won't immediately just like stop and fall over like a skinny tire might.
00:22:59 Marco: You know, so like stuff like that.
00:23:01 Marco: So basically my list of requirements became I want something that could accommodate two inch tires with fenders.
00:23:07 Marco: and the big ones are i want belt drive instead of a chain and i want there to be no oh god i don't know how this is pronounced derailleur derailleur derailleur whatever that thing is a little thing yeah whatever the thing is that moves the gears you want you want an internal internal geared hub and a belt drive you're so you're so trendy like you've never you've never had a bike with any one of these things but you already know that you want them because somebody told you that belt drive is better than a chain
00:23:34 John: Internal is better than derailleur.
00:23:37 Marco: Well, okay.
00:23:38 Marco: First of all, because the bike I have here now that came in the house in the basement is a rusty old mountain bike that has a derailleur and a rusty chain.
00:23:47 John: Yeah, but when they work, they work fine.
00:23:48 John: Believe me, they're fine.
00:23:49 Marco: No, it's not fine.
00:23:51 Marco: Because now we have better things.
00:23:53 Marco: It was fine when I was a kid when I had my mountain bike when I was in high school.
00:23:57 John: Modern bikes with derailers, I swear to you, are absolutely fine.
00:24:01 John: Anyway, internal gear, fine, whatever.
00:24:03 John: I haven't used them either.
00:24:04 John: I can't say that they're bad.
00:24:05 John: I'm just saying don't pull them as hard and fast requirements.
00:24:08 John: The really funny thing, John, is that they now have bike CVTs.
00:24:11 Marco: oh my god yeah yeah look up new vinci and it's it they have there's a cvt that's it's like about the it seemed like it's about in the same price tier as like a decent like 11 speed internal hub i just thought like oh my god if i get a cvt john will die like i will never hear the end of it it'll it'll be well you already i mean i was just thinking about this the other day both of you are slowly slowly fading from the manuals marco doesn't even have any more casey
00:24:37 John: Well, I guess you just replaced a non-manual with a non-manual, but still.
00:24:40 John: Exactly.
00:24:41 John: I'm the only one who's holding strong here.
00:24:42 John: Anyway, you can take your CVT and just pretend it has gears just like the software does in most modern cars and just make engine revving noises.
00:24:50 Marco: Yeah.
00:24:50 Marco: So basically, so my short list right now, I'm still looking at various things.
00:24:54 Marco: Some of the headliners are Priority, the Priority company.
00:24:59 Marco: I actually ordered a Priority Coast to have here at the Beach House for like
00:25:03 Marco: a general purpose bike because we have lots of people here tiff wants to ride one also so i figure i'll get this try it out it's belt drive fixed gear coaster brake uh so it's very simple it's also fairly affordable it's like 400 bucks um so i'm getting that to try it out at the high end if i get into this and i want a nice bike probably for home
00:25:23 Marco: I am very, very taken by the Budnitz bicycles.
00:25:27 Marco: I assume it's pronounced Budnitz.
00:25:29 Marco: They're pretty expensive, but they're very nice.
00:25:31 Marco: And they basically make exactly what I want.
00:25:34 Marco: So I'm going to try to find a showroom and try one of those out if I want a nice bike for home.
00:25:38 Marco: It's probably a little expensive for the beach.
00:25:40 Marco: So for the beach, I'm looking at priority.
00:25:43 Marco: Honorable mention for Breezer.
00:25:46 Marco: and electra everyone recommended these two brands and i would like to investigate them like to see them neither of them really make what i want like they don't have all those things as a combination but yeah both uh breezer and electra look really really good um also everyone says trek you know there's a reason why trek is so big and well known
00:26:04 Marco: I find the amount of branding on Trek's bikes a little bit garish.
00:26:11 Marco: Across the diagonal bar in the frame, it just has those giant letters that say, Trek!
00:26:15 Marco: I don't really want that.
00:26:17 Marco: I want something a little more low-key and subtle.
00:26:19 Marco: Maybe get a Cannondale.
00:26:20 Marco: they're subtle yeah right yes they do that's all uh yeah like and yeah so like again like wanting a belt drive internal gearing two inch tires and minimal branding that rules out a lot of what people suggest yeah
00:26:37 Marco: so i will uh i will follow up if i if i buy anything more um i'm gonna do the priority for the you know for the next few days and then you know whenever it arrives uh try that out and then if i love it i'll just use that if i hate it it'll be the tiff spare bike here and i'll keep dropping wow no she wants it all right one more one more question on bikes uh why do you why do you want fenders
00:27:01 Marco: Because the drainage on this island is not very good.
00:27:04 Marco: There's often very large puddles that I have to drive through.
00:27:07 Marco: So I just don't want it to splash back up on my back.
00:27:10 Marco: Oh, and for everybody who's sending me the IKEA bike, I did look at the IKEA Slada bike.
00:27:15 Marco: It is belt drive.
00:27:16 Marco: It has internal two-speed gear.
00:27:18 Marco: It is, in my opinion, one of the most boring-looking bikes I've ever seen.
00:27:24 Marco: I would like a bike to have some visual personality.
00:27:26 Marco: Not to scream its brand name in giant letters on the frame, but to have maybe a color that isn't just black and gray.
00:27:34 Marco: That would be nice.
00:27:36 Marco: Some kind of color.
00:27:37 Casey: Says the guy who buys black cars.
00:27:40 Casey: My car is bright red.
00:27:41 Marco: This one was.
00:27:43 Marco: Although, you know what, though?
00:27:44 Marco: This Priority Beaks Cruiser bike that I ordered, it does happen to be white.
00:27:50 Casey: You know, it's funny, Marco.
00:27:51 Casey: That can happen to a person from time to time, can't it?
00:27:54 Marco: It was the only good color.
00:27:56 Casey: Funny how that is, Marco.
00:27:58 Casey: You know, it can happen to a person from time to time, can't it?
00:28:05 Casey: You are the worst.
00:28:07 Casey: That's funny.
00:28:10 Casey: I can't wait to see pictures of you float by on Instagram on your delightful white bike.
00:28:14 Marco: Honestly, it looks really good in white.
00:28:16 Marco: White is not a bad bike color.
00:28:18 Marco: It's a terrible car color, but it's not a bad bike color.
00:28:20 John: I think this bike looks super dorky.
00:28:23 Marco: Which one?
00:28:23 Marco: The Priority Coast that I ordered?
00:28:25 Marco: It does, yeah.
00:28:26 John: Super dorky.
00:28:27 Marco: This looks like a beach bike to me.
00:28:29 Marco: It's a beach bike, yes.
00:28:30 Marco: And this company makes... They make other varieties, these Priority bikes, they make other varieties that are almost what I want.
00:28:37 Marco: Like the Continuum Onyx and the Classic Plus Gotham Edition.
00:28:42 Marco: They're almost what I want, but they only have skinny tires.
00:28:45 Marco: Because they're made for commuters and stuff.
00:28:48 Marco: So yeah, I'm probably not going to do that, but I don't know.
00:28:52 Marco: Anyway...
00:28:53 Marco: So we could go on with this forever, but we are in a huge hurry because we don't have any time tonight.
00:28:58 Marco: We really need to talk about all these Apple rumors because I'm sure no one's heard enough about them on other podcasts yet.
00:29:04 Casey: Well, there's that too.
00:29:05 Casey: We should also mention there's one other link in the show notes with regard to bikes.
00:29:08 Casey: Huffy apparently is being eaten by Walmart.
00:29:11 Casey: Do you want to explain this, John?
00:29:12 John: I mean, this is actually tangential to the larger Walmart issue.
00:29:17 John: A lot of stories about what has ruined by companies involve them pivoting to sell to superstores because that's where all the money is and then having to make crappier and crappier things and getting squeezed by the superstores that demand that you take smaller and smaller profit margins.
00:29:31 John: Yeah.
00:29:31 John: This Huffy story is actually something different.
00:29:33 John: It's where Huffy got into a deal with Walmart and didn't realize how many bikes they'd actually sell through Walmart, and they couldn't actually manufacture them, so they let their competitors manufacture them and sell them to Walmart and make the money from them.
00:29:45 John: Anyway, Walmart is bad, and we should all feel bad.
00:29:49 John: But this is another bit of feedback from Ryan Rickard, who said that Schwinn and Mongoose both pivoted to be bargain basement crap for Walmart and Target.
00:29:59 John: Uh, you know, a lot of these companies, the name remains kind of like Atari or Commodore, like the Mongoose name remains, but it shares nothing with the, the brand of my youth.
00:30:09 John: Uh, you know, everything about it, the way the bikes are designed, what they're made out of, what, where, where they're assembled, uh, what their target market is, everything is just, you know, so yeah, that's a shame.
00:30:20 John: Uh, and you can kind of tell by just looking at it, but yeah, superstores.
00:30:22 John: Yeah.
00:30:22 John: And yet another thing, superstores have tried to ruin bicycles.
00:30:27 John: i'm sorry john it is what it is uh john would you like to say face on your uh christmas story line that you tried to quote atp references uh did me the favor of looking it up although it's from imdb and i always like here's what whenever i i look up movie quotes a lot because i want to get them right it's important for me to get them right and to revalidate the correct memory because very often
00:30:51 John: I have a lot of movie quotes in my head and they mutate over time.
00:30:54 John: As you repeat them, they change a little bit.
00:30:56 John: And so like 15 years into quoting something, you're like super duper sure it's one way because you've said it a thousand times, right?
00:31:01 John: But it's changed like through a game of telephone only.
00:31:04 John: It's been inside your head the whole time, right?
00:31:05 John: And so it's changed inside your head.
00:31:07 John: Anyway, I always want to look them up, but I don't trust in the internet text of someone like, oh, here's this famous quote from this movie because text is not the movie.
00:31:15 John: You know, the map is not the territory.
00:31:17 John: I need to see the video.
00:31:19 John: I need to see the clip from the movie.
00:31:21 John: And obviously that can be doctored too.
00:31:23 John: And I weep for our children who will be able to trust video even less than we do due to the easy ability to synthesize audio and video.
00:31:30 John: Sorry, kids.
00:31:31 John: Anyway, that's progress for you.
00:31:33 John: But according to IMDb, the upper amble aside, the line I was trying to quote last time from A Christmas Story is the greatest Christmas gift I had ever received or ever would receive.
00:31:43 John: I think I missed the had.
00:31:44 John: Greatest Christmas gift I had ever received or would ever receive.
00:31:48 John: Anyway, there it is.
00:31:50 John: Nobody cares about me, but I do care.
00:31:52 John: Awesome.
00:31:53 John: That should be the title of my biography.
00:31:56 John: Nobody cares about me, but I do care.
00:31:58 John: The John Syracuse story.
00:32:00 John: That's perfect.
00:32:03 Marco: We are sponsored this week by Casper.
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00:32:22 Marco: The Casper team, on the other hand, is really a bunch of engineering nerds who dug as far as possible into the science of sleep and the technology to help get you that sleep.
00:32:32 Marco: The Casper mattress combines pressure-relieving supportive memory foam with a breathable open cell layer for all-night comfort.
00:32:40 Marco: And this obsessive engineering really makes the mattress shine.
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00:32:52 Marco: It was designed by a team of 20 engineers, and it was perfected by a community of nearly half a million sleepers.
00:32:58 Marco: and buying the mattress is completely easy because you can order online it's delivered to your door in a compact box with free shipping and if you don't like it free returns and they will give you a hundred nights to try it out and see if it's for you you sleep on it for a hundred nights and if you don't think it's for you you call them up and they give you a no hassle no questions asked free return they arrange for it to be picked up at your house
00:33:24 Marco: It's been available in the U.S.
00:33:25 Marco: and Canada, and now it's also available in the U.K., so U.K.
00:33:28 Marco: people.
00:33:29 Marco: You can now join the Casper Parade.
00:33:31 Marco: You know, if you consider you spend a third of our lives on the mattress that you have, it is so important to really get a great mattress, to be able to try it out for those 100 days before you commit, and to really make sure you got the right one for you.
00:33:43 Marco: If you're interested in learning more, you can dive deeper into the science behind the perfect mattress and get $50 towards any mattress purchase at casper.com slash ATP by using code ATP.
00:33:54 Marco: Terms and conditions do apply.
00:33:55 Marco: Thank you very much to Casper for sponsoring our show.
00:34:02 Casey: The good news is not a lot happened this week.
00:34:07 Casey: So we can move right along.
00:34:09 Casey: No, things have happened, my friends.
00:34:11 Casey: Things have happened.
00:34:12 Casey: So let me do my best job as chief summarizer in chief and kind of do a 50,000-foot summary, and then we'll dig into the details, which inevitably means you two will interrupt me on about sentence three, and I will never get to complete my summary.
00:34:25 Casey: But...
00:34:26 Casey: There was a HomePod firmware that was posted to the place one would expect HomePod firmware to be.
00:34:35 Casey: Do you guys say firmware or firmwares?
00:34:38 Casey: I would say firmware is the plural.
00:34:40 John: You would say firmwares?
00:34:41 John: Like softwares?
00:34:42 Casey: Well, that's why I would say firmware.
00:34:44 Casey: But for a fleeting moment there, I just thought, well, should it be firmware?
00:34:47 Casey: No, it shouldn't be.
00:34:48 Marco: Wait, isn't wares how you're supposed to pronounce W-A-R-E-Z?
00:34:53 Casey: Oh, yes, that is true.
00:34:54 Marco: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:34:54 John: Yeah, that's a Z, but that's not what we're talking about.
00:34:56 Marco: Did you ever say it that way in your head growing up?
00:34:58 Marco: Because I always said Juarez and... You also say Moe.
00:35:02 John: Juarez and Moe.
00:35:04 Casey: Juarez.
00:35:05 John: No, no, that's a place in Mexico, I think.
00:35:08 Casey: No, I definitely said where's in my head.
00:35:10 John: I definitely said where's too.
00:35:12 Casey: I was going to say you should cut this, but no, this is worth it now.
00:35:16 Casey: So we got to keep it in.
00:35:18 Casey: All right.
00:35:18 Casey: So anyway, so wherever you would expect the HomePod firmware, singular yet plural, to be is where they found somebody had stumbled upon firmware download.
00:35:28 Casey: And so a couple of people seem to grab onto that.
00:35:32 Casey: Well, many people, but particularly a couple of people seem to grab on this and start digging it apart.
00:35:36 Casey: A friend of the show...
00:35:37 Casey: can you concentrate we're professionals seven second ago joke marco keep up all right let's bring it back together kids bring it back together so uh two people really dug into this in particular and uh the two people were steve trout and smith who is a dear friend of the show and guillermo rambo who also uh did a lot of digging on this and so
00:36:06 Casey: They found a lot of interesting stuff and the highlights were an image that is for an iPhone that is codenamed D22 that looks like the image that we've seen off and on of this supposed iPhone Pro where it seems to be an edge to edge screen.
00:36:22 Casey: There's like a little notch at the top, which presumably holds the speaker and the FaceTime camera.
00:36:27 Casey: There was some information about how apparently there will be front facing IR camera that presumably looks to be for face detection and a bunch of other stuff, too.
00:36:41 Casey: But that's kind of the quick, quick, quick summary.
00:36:43 Casey: So how would we like to dig into this?
00:36:46 Marco: I'll tell you one way we do not want to dig into this is by spraying bug spray on our legs earlier so I could weed whack all the tick infested grass out in front of the house and then coming inside doing a podcast with you fine gentlemen putting my hands on my legs and then remember my eyes.
00:37:01 Casey: Oh, that's not wise.
00:37:03 Casey: Do you need a moment to collect yourself?
00:37:05 Marco: It's slowly going away.
00:37:06 Marco: I think I might be okay.
00:37:08 Marco: Or you might go blind soon.
00:37:09 Marco: Next time, just accept the bug bites.
00:37:11 Marco: Well, there's ticks out there.
00:37:12 Marco: I don't want to get tick bites.
00:37:15 Marco: Oh, God.
00:37:16 Marco: I'm going to try not to tuck my feet.
00:37:17 Marco: I'm like, I'll just put it on my legs.
00:37:19 Marco: That way it won't be a problem for the rest of the night like it is when you put it on your whole body.
00:37:22 Marco: Because all you really need for ticks is to put it on your feet and legs.
00:37:26 John: I found one tick on me on Long Island just a couple days ago, and it was not on my legs.
00:37:31 John: yikes all right well i don't want to hear the rest of that story yeah this sounds super ominous it had not bitten me yet it was still crawling trying to find a place to bite that's good i removed it with prejudice all right so what do we think of d22 so i think um well here's a couple things so this
00:37:52 John: Well, I don't know if we want to go into the leaking things.
00:37:54 John: I guess we'll go into that at the end.
00:37:55 John: But the information revealed, once you leak the HomePod firmware, people think, well, so what?
00:38:00 John: Who cares if they leak the HomePod firmware?
00:38:02 John: The HomePod's not out yet.
00:38:03 John: We already know what it is.
00:38:04 John: It's a speaker turdy thing.
00:38:06 John: Why would we get any information from that?
00:38:10 John: And it's because it runs iOS and iOS has a bunch of crap in it.
00:38:13 John: And normally that crap is removed from builds that they release to the public.
00:38:17 John: Even in the betas, they remove all the stuff that they don't want you to see.
00:38:20 John: What might they not want you to see?
00:38:21 John: Icons, frameworks, you know, the names of symbols, programmary type stuff.
00:38:29 John: And the people who pulled down this HomePod firmware, you know, extract that stuff.
00:38:34 John: They look at all the frameworks and look at the names of the frameworks and the names of the functions and the symbols that are in them.
00:38:39 John: They look at all of the resources for different kinds of icons and graphics and stuff like that that appears in dialog boxes and in the UI.
00:38:47 John: And you can learn a tremendous amount without even executing any of this code just because it happens to be iOS and this build doesn't have stuff excluded from it.
00:38:54 John: So we learned, learned, quote unquote, a lot of
00:38:58 John: interesting things just by looking at the framework names and the symbols and there's the whole frameworks having to do and you know classes and methods having to do with things about face recognition and recognizing different kinds of faces and why would that be in there well we are all have the rumors about recognizing your face you put two and two together you say that's probably what that is down to the point where you're looking at like attributes on classes that say like inset and border radius and stuff that's sort of confirming the idea that
00:39:23 John: The entire edge to edge screen will be addressable with sort of curves around the edges, you know, and classes that might indicate how they might handle the home button at the bottom of the screen and displaying things there and stuff like that.
00:39:36 John: So it's it's kind of tea leaf reading in that we don't have any actual.
00:39:40 John: leaked hardware for the phone or anything like that what we just have is a bunch of symbols and functions but if you're a programmer and you're familiar with ui kit and the rest of ios and just programming in general you can kind of piece together a surprisingly detailed picture of how this new phone might work based on the ios that was released as part of the home pod you know home pods os release and so it's kind of a weird
00:40:06 John: Kind of a weird leak, but it just goes to show that like anything on the Internet, you don't like it.
00:40:14 John: Security through obscurity is no security at all.
00:40:16 John: It never has been.
00:40:17 John: But in the age of the Internet, even even less so.
00:40:20 John: But I was I was fascinated to see the slow leak of people pulling out all the different.
00:40:24 John: details of the os to the point where there was really good uh blog post by alan pike where he puts all puts it all together and says based on everything that we've seen here's one way that i think the theoretical phone might work from a software perspective
00:40:39 John: So we've got hardware rumors, and then we've got a leak of the HomePod thing.
00:40:43 John: And then from that, synthesize this entire complete picture of one way that the OS might work.
00:40:49 John: Now, it could be entirely wrong.
00:40:51 John: It could be, you know, something different than this.
00:40:53 John: But I was pretty impressed by this.
00:40:57 John: Just the normal parts leak that you get, plus a bunch of class dumps and icon files.
00:41:04 John: And now we have, like, a complete iPhone Pro...
00:41:08 John: possible scenario supported by all the available leaked evidence that i think actually is pretty cool if they don't do this i hope they do something just as cool because i read this thing i'm like that a makes sense b fits with everything that we've been leaked and c is pretty neat
00:41:23 Casey: Yeah, I completely agree.
00:41:26 Marco: I'm not a fan of the idea of this weird cut out into the screen with the cameras and everything.
00:41:34 Marco: I don't like that.
00:41:36 Marco: It seems like a weird hack.
00:41:38 Marco: But if they're going to do it,
00:41:40 Marco: This looks like a really cool way to do it, like with the whole idea of having a split status bar such that basically you it's almost as if the screen's not cut out.
00:41:50 Marco: It's almost like if applications don't really have access to that area or if you only get it in things like overscroll areas under navigation bars and stuff like that, then it's still weird, but it's a clever it's a clever hack.
00:42:07 Marco: It's a good question about things like where the clock goes and what about stuff that won't fit in the cutouts.
00:42:14 Marco: There's a lot in the status bar these days.
00:42:18 Marco: Not as much as on Android, though.
00:42:20 Marco: Well, that's true, yeah.
00:42:21 Casey: I was just about to say the same thing.
00:42:23 Casey: Oh, my goodness.
00:42:24 Casey: Looking at my co-workers' Android phones that have just a mountain of icons up there.
00:42:30 John: It's like a ticker tape.
00:42:31 John: My sister got a new Android phone that I just saw.
00:42:33 John: Like, fresh out of the box, no weird stuff on it, a Samsung Android phone, 100 icons in the status bar.
00:42:39 John: I may be overestimating, but only slightly.
00:42:41 Casey: It's so true.
00:42:42 Casey: It's like a ticker tape of icons, and I think it's bad.
00:42:45 John: It's like every Mac user you've ever seen in your office who has 100 icons in their menu bar, Casey.
00:42:50 Casey: Oh, no, I have fewer than most.
00:42:52 Casey: Thank you very much.
00:42:53 Casey: You just are hating on the iStat menus that I have up there.
00:42:55 Casey: But no, I like the the fact if you have to install Bartender, which I'm sure is a very great app.
00:43:01 Casey: If you have to install Bartender, you have bigger problems, my friend, than than just moving some of them out of your menu bar.
00:43:08 Casey: Like you should just get them out into.
00:43:10 Casey: Oh, God, I hate apps that force a menu bar icon.
00:43:13 Casey: It drives me bananas.
00:43:14 John: oh so uh actually i've derailed myself looking at the top of this notes i there's a couple of i mean look looking at the symbols and everything and having face recognition symbols like that is not as big as slam dunk as people think if we didn't already have the face recognition rumor there's all sorts of weird symbols on there and maybe it wouldn't ship maybe it's not ready like we didn't see we didn't see the internal builds of ios 10 for all we know these symbols could have been in there in ios 10 they just didn't make the cut you know or something like that or whatever right but we have all those other rumors about being face recognition so this you know but it all adds up right but
00:43:43 John: The other part of this though is...
00:43:45 John: All the rumors about the little unibrow thing, the little notch, the cutout.
00:43:48 John: I mean, we saw that little notch thing.
00:43:50 John: I think we talked about it when we were talking about Touch ID being on the back and how they're going to do a screen thing edge to edge and what they can and can't embed in the screen.
00:43:57 John: And apparently they can't embed like the cameras.
00:43:59 John: And if there's going to be an IR sensor and the speaker and blah, blah, blah.
00:44:01 John: So there's this notch.
00:44:02 John: I think one of you, maybe Marco thought it was the notch just doesn't seem like an Apple thing to do way back when, when we talked about it.
00:44:08 John: You know, it's not elegant.
00:44:09 John: Like you just said before, like the notch seems weird, doesn't it?
00:44:11 John: Like, well, wouldn't it be great if the whole thing was screened?
00:44:13 John: It would be.
00:44:13 John: Oh, but we can't quite pull it off.
00:44:15 John: So what can we do?
00:44:16 John: Well, we'll do the best we can and leave this little notch, right?
00:44:20 John: And that's always been the question.
00:44:21 John: Apple wouldn't do it unless they could do the whole screen.
00:44:23 John: They're not going to do a little notch thing.
00:44:24 John: Kind of like people saying Apple's not going to put a camera that causes a bulge, but they totally did because it's more worth it to have a really good camera than to make the back of it smooth, so...
00:44:34 John: camera bulb is here to stay and so in the home pod firmware leak there is an icon for d22 that is just it's not a picture of the new iphone it is it's an icon like a little vector drawing or whatever of the thing but it has to look iconic it has to let you know by looking at this little icon this is the phone we're talking about
00:44:51 John: so it's basically like a rounded rectangle i imagine for the seven and seven plus sizes right but this one has the notch in it and it's the only thing in it it is a rounded rectangle and the only distinguishing characteristic other than the width and height and the border radius is the notch and so this is a pretty hard confirmation of that notch because they're not waffling about whether there's gonna be a notch at this point there's
00:45:12 John: this this icon is in there and it doesn't seem like they would have this thing and the code name d22 is right on what you expect it to be so this thing's gonna have a notch and that's weird and that's it's like the camera bump but even worse it's not as bad as touch id on the back but it is a weird thing to do and so you know apple
00:45:29 John: rumors are that this this all-screen oled phone has been in the works for a long time and not that i'm saying it's behind schedule but i bet apple would have loved to ship it last year but they couldn't it wasn't ready now it's ready they're going with the notch so for me from this leak the most important thing about it is notch is a go get ready get ready for notch get ready to love the notch get ready to deal with the notch get ready to
00:45:51 John: fix your application that gets screwed up when the notch is there um also on a press conversation about hey they changed the dots to be bars you think they did that to get make room for the notch i think and it was like well maybe but we don't even know if there's going to be a notch well it's going to be a notch so no more dots back to bars makes perfect sense
00:46:08 Marco: I think what I like about this leak, though, is that it gives us enough to be really interested in this, but there's still so much that we don't know that we're only going to know once we see the software running on the phone, which we're almost certainly not going to see before the event.
00:46:25 Marco: So even though – leading up to this, we had the idea of a lot of the major themes of this device leading up for almost the last year in all the rumors and everything.
00:46:36 Marco: But we didn't know many specifics, and most of the things that we'd see leaked or rumored or talked about here and there would be very vague and very unsure of themselves and oftentimes conflicting.
00:46:49 Marco: Right?
00:46:49 Marco: And so now, even though this is now like pretty strong evidence of it being a certain way, and so some of that surprise is now kind of spoiled, what we have now learned, you know, and again, it's not like knowledge.
00:47:03 Marco: It's not, it isn't a fact.
00:47:05 Marco: It isn't a guarantee.
00:47:06 Marco: It's just very strong evidence in a certain direction.
00:47:09 Marco: But what this nearly confirms is not something that was totally unknown to us.
00:47:18 Marco: Like there were rumors of all these things.
00:47:20 Marco: There were rumors of the notch.
00:47:22 Marco: There were rumors of the –
00:47:23 Marco: Face detection type stuff and depth cameras and everything.
00:47:28 Marco: All that stuff was rumored for months.
00:47:30 Marco: And that was already becoming the dominant narrative of the rumors.
00:47:34 Marco: That was becoming where most of them were kind of coalescing and gathering.
00:47:38 Marco: So it didn't actually spoil much surprise.
00:47:43 Marco: It just kind of like says, all right, this group of the rumors, which was already the predominant ones, this is probably on the right path.
00:47:51 Marco: But there's still so many questions that it's still very interesting to us.
00:47:56 Marco: And most of those questions are not going to be answered until the event.
00:47:59 John: They added some information, too.
00:48:01 John: Like, again, with the symbol dumps, stuff that we wouldn't have known normally until the keynote because it's software-based, right?
00:48:07 John: So there's a bunch of symbols having to do with, apparently, the camera detecting what it is you're taking a picture of.
00:48:13 John: You're taking a picture of a person.
00:48:14 John: Is it a plant?
00:48:15 John: Is it a sunset?
00:48:16 John: Is it, you know, whatever it might be.
00:48:19 John: Most modern regular cameras have something.
00:48:21 John: Oh, I can tell it's portrait versus landscape because I do simple face detection.
00:48:24 John: But this was way more detailed.
00:48:25 John: I'm going to find the link to put all things.
00:48:27 John: But it was like figuring out...
00:48:29 John: In a fairly detailed manner, what it is you're looking at and what will it do with that information besides putting the word hot dog or not hot dog on the screen?
00:48:36 John: Presumably, you can adjust the camera based on what it's looking at.
00:48:40 John: I get that reference.
00:48:41 John: It could metadata tag them or something.
00:48:44 John: I mean, who knows?
00:48:45 John: But those symbols are in there.
00:48:47 John: And there's all sorts of other stuff about...
00:48:49 John: uh face detection or we assume about face detection whereas the face is half covered the face is smiling or frowning or like oh tons of symbols that only make sense if if this phone with these set of sensors on it can figure out way more about what it's looking at whether it's looking at it to take a picture or looking at it to unlock your phone or whatever all these symbols indicate that there are
00:49:10 John: It surely features somewhere in iOS 11 running on this phone that are based on the camera having a much richer awareness of what's going on around it, also including, like, presence detection.
00:49:20 John: Are you in front of the phone or whatever?
00:49:22 John: So that, I think, added information.
00:49:24 John: None of that stuff had been rumored.
00:49:25 John: Like, wow, you know, we...
00:49:26 John: the rumors that oh it's going to have camera and a notch and an ir sensor and face detection unlock that's all the stuff that would leak but but the keynote would be like oh and also now that we have all those sensors you know what we can do we can know when you take a picture of a dog and tag it with dog and make this the smart search easier when you search for dog even if you took a picture of the tip of the dog's tail we you know we figured that out and like
00:49:49 John: I don't like features like that are things normally we don't get to see until the day of.
00:49:53 John: So I think this is one of the biggest software leaks that has ever happened to Apple, because I think it reveals potentially so much about stuff that they're going to demo that they just assume no one would know about, because in general, the software doesn't leak.
00:50:06 John: I mean, this is a pretty big leak in terms of just, oops, like, we didn't mean to put this build there.
00:50:16 John: By the way, if people are wondering why, why is this build accessible at all?
00:50:19 John: HomePods have been testing on Apple employees and other people who are in the know have been testing HomePods for a long time, and they have a feed for software updates, but that is a feed that is not accessible to the general public.
00:50:30 John: It's only accessible to Apple employees, right?
00:50:33 John: someone made a mistake and took the firmware that's supposed to go on that feed that's only accessible to apple employees and put it on the public facing one and that is a pretty big mistake like it's kind of like taking you know i don't know like uh ios 11 or before any of the betas came out and putting it on a publicly accessible url on the internet and again a security through obscurity it's like well
00:50:54 John: you put something on a url that's accessible to the internet as long as no one knows the url it's not like people are randomly typing in urls to guess where your thing might be that's exactly what they're doing and the url was guessable because you just replaced the word tv with the word audio in an existing url for tv os updates and guess what you got this and somebody had a really bad day at apple and i feel bad because you know it's you're human you make mistakes it just goes to show all the security and all these billions of dollars they spend
00:51:22 John: You know, I don't think this is delicious.
00:51:25 John: Just someone made a mistake.
00:51:27 John: We all make mistakes.
00:51:28 John: Sometimes you leave a phone in a bar.
00:51:30 John: Sometimes you upload the unredacted version of the new iOS that includes all the secret symbols for your new super secret phone onto a public URL.
00:51:42 John: And so I feel kind of bad, but I'm also kind of excited about exactly how much we were able to mine out of this.
00:51:47 John: And like Marco said, and still we're not sure.
00:51:50 John: Still we have to wait for the keynote to see.
00:51:52 John: which things are which it's a it's a little bit of spoiling christmas morning to know how you know because i can extrapolate so many things that could possibly be there and the keynote will just be a narrowing but still pretty exciting do you um i don't have the link handy but there maybe it was alan's i don't think it was though but anyways there was someone who was uh critiquing no it's a different ui designer
00:52:12 Casey: critiquing, what do you do with the notch?
00:52:15 Casey: And there's like one of the approaches is you pretend the notch isn't really there.
00:52:21 Casey: And one of the approaches is you embrace the notch.
00:52:23 Casey: And I think it was Steve Trouton Smith that was saying, oh, I say embrace the notch, you know, make it visible, make it plain.
00:52:29 Casey: But from what I see on like, for example, Alan's post,
00:52:33 Casey: where it's just a big black bar and presumably this is OLED.
00:52:37 Casey: So it would just kind of all blend in and there would just be this big gap in the center of the black bar, but you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell very well what was there.
00:52:45 Casey: I think I like that at a glance more than this, like embrace the notch, make it white to the left and the right of the notch.
00:52:53 Casey: What do you guys think about that?
00:52:54 Casey: Let's start with Marco.
00:52:55 Marco: Totally with you.
00:52:56 Marco: I think the design that makes the parts left and right of the notch just black and makes it look like a big status bar, that to me is by far the best looking option here.
00:53:07 Marco: And that is the one that I think they should and hopefully will do.
00:53:12 Marco: um but there is there is a risk i don't know if it's a big risk there's a risk that the desire to have these like over these like overflow areas these over scroll areas in the ui similar how like you know when i was seven ever since i was seven um you've had like if you have like a navigation bar or a toolbar in an interface you could you have like the blurred version of the scroll view in the middle kind of underhanging the like the top and bottom like it kind of overflows into those areas as you scroll um
00:53:41 Marco: I can see maybe the Apple UI designers wanting to do more of that with this newfound screen real estate and to have these new areas, both the little tabs next to the status bar and also the new presumed home button area at the bottom.
00:53:58 Marco: I could see those becoming just over-scroll areas, but I hope they don't do that.
00:54:03 Marco: I hope, if anything, if they want to do that, just make it the bottom one and not little tabs on top because having this big file card-shaped UI I think looks weird.
00:54:15 Marco: I don't like having those two tabs at the top be visibly light-colored UI.
00:54:21 Marco: I think it should just look like a big status bar, and you shouldn't even really think about the notch most of the time.
00:54:28 Casey: I agree.
00:54:29 John: So I think it was Steve Trout and Smith pointed this out, but I think people have noted this as well.
00:54:34 John: The thing that we extracted, the thing that has been extracted by industrious hackers from the firmware is an icon of the phone.
00:54:43 John: And it's supposed to be identifiable.
00:54:44 John: So you look at that and you know, oh, they're talking about whatever, the iPhone Pro or the iPhone 8, whatever this thing is going to be called.
00:54:50 John: So it needs to be a recognizable symbol at small sizes.
00:54:54 John: And the only distinguishing fixture of that icon is the notch.
00:54:57 John: So in order for people to look at that and say, oh, that means my phone, which is the purpose of the icon, that notch has to be a distinguishing visual characteristics of the phone as far as the users are concerned.
00:55:09 John: Otherwise, that icon is not useful for identifying it.
00:55:11 John: So that could be as simple as, okay, well...
00:55:15 John: It works exactly like you guys were just describing when you use it.
00:55:17 John: Like we pretend it's not there and it's just like the status bar.
00:55:20 John: But the lock screen, for example, when we show your big lock screen picture, that shows with the notch all the time because that would make, you know, that's your first experience of turning on the phone, you know, or seeing the lock screen or whatever that, oh, it's got a notch, right?
00:55:32 John: If the notch goes away when you launch apps, you still recognize it as the phone with the notch because that's what you see when you first turn it on.
00:55:39 John: But I think at the very least, Apple is embracing the notch
00:55:43 John: to the degree to the degree that this icon is representative it doesn't mean you're going to see it the whole time you're using it inside applications but it does mean that they're embracing it somewhere probably in the lock screen maybe also in springboard maybe also it i mean i'm trying to think of you know
00:56:02 John: if developers wanted to could they address it and show video in the notch like overflow video like who knows how far developers would be able to go but it seems clear to me that apple in the same way they essentially embrace the camera bump by saying we're not hiding it it's there it's a camera bump look at it there's going to be a notch and i think there has to be at least some context where the notch is absolutely visible and distinguished and a distinguishing characteristic to people
00:56:26 John: i also would prefer like both of you all right fine i see the notch i get your branding i can identify my phone but once i'm using the application don't you know i don't i don't need it doesn't need to be emphasized you can make it disappear with a nice status bar hopefully that's up to developers if developers want to do something fancy with the notch maybe they can in the same way you can mess with the status bar in weird ways to varying degrees in old os's couldn't you change the color of the status bar to anything you wanted back in the old days and they kind of clamped down on that
00:56:53 Marco: No, you could have it be white or black, but you could never have it be arbitrary colors.
00:56:58 Marco: You could have a translucent one and kind of put a window behind it to make it kind of fake it, but I don't know of any apps that really ever did that with any success.
00:57:09 John: Yeah, and actually, you know, either way they go with this, I think the bottom part of the screen is actually more interesting.
00:57:16 John: That gets into what Alan Pike was talking about.
00:57:17 John: So the top fine, we assume it's a status bar and there's some interesting things you can do by, you know, getting, you know, going, bleeding the pixels up higher on the screen because it's almost edge to edge, especially if you incorporate the notch into the status bar.
00:57:31 John: But the action happens down at the bottom where all of a sudden you've got all the screen where there used to be a hardware home button.
00:57:36 John: And of course, you can draw a software home button there, but you've got all this other space where you can draw things to what might you use that for.
00:57:41 John: And one of Alan Pike's suggestion is take your UI nav bar, whatever that class is called, and take the current awkward arrangement with lots of white space and take those navigation controls like done or edit or whatever those little words that are up in the corner that are hard to reach in your big phone.
00:57:56 John: And shove them down next to the home button because now that's all a screen and it's actually easier to reach.
00:58:02 John: There's been a lot of articles recently about how it's easier to reach the bottom of your really big phone with your thumb and the top of the really big phone.
00:58:07 John: So bottom navigation becomes more preferable than it was back in the days of the original iPhone size or even the five size.
00:58:15 John: um and it makes a lot of sense like whether they do that or not you look at that and you go oh okay well that would work and it would make sense uh based on the design we currently see in ios 11 betas um but maybe they won't do that maybe what can you do with the bottom you've got a lot of pixels down there apple's surely going to reserve some of them for os related functions uh in in the sort of the default case where you don't want to go you know full bleed video or whatever um
00:58:42 John: You could do interesting stuff down there.
00:58:45 John: Instead of just showing a circle where you put your thumb, presumably to use the Touch ID sensor that may or may not be buried under the screen.
00:58:52 Casey: Yeah, it's funny because I feel like we have learned a lot in this leak.
00:59:00 Casey: But I think you guys are right that...
00:59:02 Casey: I don't know that we've learned all that much, but we've more gotten some soft confirmation of a lot of the things that were already suspected.
00:59:11 Casey: And though I still think this is the second biggest leak that I've ever witnessed as compared to the, what was it, the iPhone 4 that was found in the bar?
00:59:21 Casey: Yep.
00:59:21 Casey: So I think that still takes the cake for the biggest leak.
00:59:24 Casey: But, man, this is a close second.
00:59:26 Casey: And it's fascinating.
00:59:29 Casey: Like, I feel kind of bad for...
00:59:31 Casey: The Apple developers, like the developers within Apple that have been working on this stuff and have been really sweating this and were hoping for the big splash surprise, like that article was, I think it was that article that floated around like a month ago that talked about this.
00:59:45 Casey: Or maybe it was on the talk show live.
00:59:48 Casey: Maybe that's what it was.
00:59:48 Casey: It doesn't matter.
00:59:49 Casey: Somewhere they were saying, you know, really, it's a bummer for the employees when something leaks, the other employees.
00:59:53 Casey: And that kind of stinks.
00:59:55 Casey: But I do think it is fascinating and super cool how a couple of developers in particular have been able to kind of figure out all of this stuff just by going spelunking into the firmware.
01:00:07 Casey: And I should have expected something like this from a man with the surname of Rambo.
01:00:11 Casey: I mean, this is how the Rambos work, right?
01:00:14 Casey: That's what we learned from the movies.
01:00:16 John: I didn't catch this before in our discussion of firmware, but like, it's interesting to me that with HomePod, we reverted to the old nomenclature because back on the original iPhone, the iPhone came with firmware because it's a phone.
01:00:27 John: Phones don't run OS's, silly.
01:00:29 John: It's firmware, right?
01:00:31 John: And obviously that's before, you know.
01:00:33 John: it was called iphone os after that i believe and then it switched to ios right uh but now i'm on the home pod because it's so wussy and doesn't have a screen even though they've extracted a screen resolution as far as ios is concerned a very small screen resolution and potentially a number of
01:00:49 John: number of addressable LEDs, blah, blah, blah.
01:00:50 John: Anyway, now it's back to firmware.
01:00:53 John: It's like, it's called, you know, the reason I got this in the URLs, they changed tvOS to audio.
01:00:59 John: So if you want to give it a name, tvOS runs on Apple TV, iOS runs on, you know, iPhones and iPods and iPads.
01:01:06 John: And, uh,
01:01:07 John: uh audio os runs on the home pod but we don't call it audio os it's still it's stuck in front i guess you still got to start in firmware and work your way up till we start referring you to your actual uh os update uh yeah that's a little bit weird i guess they want to make it seem like an embedded thing it's also in case you were wondering about um
01:01:29 John: the amazon echo show and the potential uh we discussed many times of apple's home thing that sits in your home having a screen on it naming the thing audio s obviously there's nothing but you can rename it whenever you want they rename their s's all the time but it's a pretty strong stake in the ground for this product this product we already knew but like in case you're wondering do they expect the operating system to do a lot of displaying of pictures no it's called audio s is it
01:01:55 John: Whether or not it has a screen that can show weird symbols or an addressable grid of LEDs under a diffuser or whatever, the OS is all about audio.
01:02:04 Casey: Any other thoughts about all this?
01:02:06 Casey: Not really.
01:02:07 John: Sure, there's stuff that I forgot to put in the notes, but there was so much stuff that was leaked and so many people digging into this that I just couldn't even keep up with it.
01:02:16 Casey: Yeah, I feel like this should be like a four-hour conversation for us, but I really feel like we've kind of touched on all of it.
01:02:22 John: Well, and also, like, I mean, as Marco said before, everything that's in this leak has been discussed before with the exception of a few additional symbols that lean towards features that hadn't been, you know, that could have been imagined, but that hadn't been thought about.
01:02:34 John: You know, like the camera understanding what's taking a picture of and adjusting things, but you can extrapolate that from the sensors.
01:02:39 John: And it just shows how...
01:02:41 John: uh imagination plus the usual hardware supply chain leaks can get us most of the way there anyway oled we've known forever screen edge to edge we've also known forever uh face detection was was a big leak uh and then ir sensors and stuff like that and how it's going to support it touch of d in the screen versus the back is still up in the air nothing in this goes one way or the other i think
01:03:05 John: And then the HomePod leak would just nail all that dying for us.
01:03:08 John: But we were already talking about all those things.
01:03:10 John: It was like, oh, I feel bad for the employees, blah, blah, blah.
01:03:12 John: Well, if this leak had not happened, we'd all be watching that keynote saying, I can't wait to see the OLED phone that does face recognition with an edge-to-edge screen, potentially with a notch in it.
01:03:21 John: We were already there.
01:03:22 John: It's just confirming stuff.
01:03:24 John: It continues to be hard for Apple to be secretive about something that it's going to build literally millions of.
01:03:32 John: like months ahead of time like someone's gonna build them human beings are gonna build them and this information has value to many different parties the least of which is a bunch of apple nerds like it has value to like people who are designing cases or making clones or competitively like it's it's really it's really hard to keep this kind of secret and uh apple continues to prove that that no matter how much money you have no matter how careful you are
01:03:58 John: We're going to find out about your phone.
01:04:01 John: Mac Pro is going to be pretty secret, though, let me tell you.
01:04:03 Marco: Yeah.
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01:05:29 Casey: What do you have, John, about this nickname that Gruber reported?
01:05:34 Marco: The Ferrari nickname?
01:05:35 Casey: Yeah.
01:05:36 Casey: iPhone D22's nickname may have been Ferrari.
01:05:39 John: Oh, yeah.
01:05:40 John: That makes perfect sense because we've all been talking about this phone in that kind of way as they're going to make phones like the 7 and the 7+.
01:05:49 John: and they're going to be fine phones, and those are the normal ones, but then there's the fancy one.
01:05:53 John: The fancy one is edge-to-edge screen and made of exotic materials and going to be more expensive, and Ferrari's the perfect name for it.
01:05:59 John: It's not the phone that everybody's going to have, and a lot of the stories and a lot of Gruber's writing about it has been about
01:06:05 John: how a this will be phone be more expensive because why make it the same price as the other ones it's called you know you're going to segment the market like good better best or whatever um and b how they probably can't make as many of these like if this was the only iphone that potentially they wouldn't be able to make as many of them because one or more parts in it are not being able to be manufactured in volume and
01:06:26 John: Uh, the, the meta point about the Ferrari phone is like, if Apple can only ever put technology in its phones that it can make 60 million of like for launch day or whatever, it's going to be at a disadvantage against competitors that only have to make like 2 million phones.
01:06:40 John: If you can make 2 million phones, you're like, I just need 2 million of this special awesome screen.
01:06:44 John: Uh,
01:06:44 John: And Apple's like, oh, that screen is awesome.
01:06:46 John: We'd love to put that screen in our phone.
01:06:47 John: Sorry, we can only make 2 million of those.
01:06:49 John: And Apple's like, well, we need 60 million.
01:06:51 John: Well, we can't make them any of that screen.
01:06:52 John: So you can't put that screen in your phone.
01:06:53 John: So this gives them, in addition to segmenting the market, like, oh, you want to pay even more for an iPhone?
01:06:58 John: Apple is happy to accommodate you.
01:07:00 John: Yay.
01:07:01 John: What can we put in this phone that's worth the extra money?
01:07:03 John: Well, we can make it look cooler.
01:07:05 John: We can have fancy features like the face detection and the edge-to-edge screen.
01:07:08 John: And we can put components in it that we can only make...
01:07:11 John: 12 million of or 15 million of instead of 60 i'm making these numbers up but like whatever like and the ferrari name fits with that ferraris cars that cost more than other cars they make fewer of them and they're really fancy so and eddie q is on the board of ferrari so everything fits it all works uh yeah yeah all right so no more thoughts on this leak i feel bad for uh the responsible party though my goodness
01:07:36 Marco: I can't tell if my water smells like DEET or if my hands smell like DEET that are handling the water.
01:07:42 John: Stop eating bug spray, Marco.
01:07:44 John: It's going to affect the show eventually.
01:07:46 John: I can tell when Marco's drinking and I can tell when he's eating bug spray.
01:07:50 Casey: He is high as a kite.
01:07:53 Marco: I've been in the sun a lot today.
01:07:56 Casey: Fly away, Marco.
01:07:57 Casey: Hey, there's no more iPods except the iPod Touch.
01:08:00 Marco: There could be only one.
01:08:02 Casey: Yeah, that's Highlander, John.
01:08:04 Casey: It's a Highlander reference.
01:08:05 John: Yeah, it went over my head at least.
01:08:06 John: Don't worry.
01:08:08 John: I'm still okay.
01:08:08 John: I didn't get a reference.
01:08:09 John: Marco can't get there can be only one.
01:08:11 John: This is a new low, folks.
01:08:13 John: What is the most well-known reference that Marco will not get?
01:08:17 John: Highlander is now... There Can Be Only One is now in the lead.
01:08:21 Marco: I mean, if you're talking about most popular things that I haven't seen, you've got to go probably Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter.
01:08:29 Marco: Or maybe Star Trek...
01:08:30 John: but but you but no but this is different like you don't expect you to have seen highlander we're not crazy here but but to know that that is a that is a reference to highlander like it's a very popular internet mean reused many many times you don't have to have ever seen the movie to know that that anyway but i think that's the top of the leaderboard now because i would say that is pretty well known
01:08:53 John: Anyway, no more iPods.
01:08:55 John: Sometimes I forget they still make them.
01:08:57 Marco: I feel like that's the best time for Apple to discontinue a product quietly like this is when half people who hear the news say, oh, they still made those?
01:09:08 Marco: That probably is a good indicator that they killed it at an appropriate time.
01:09:12 Marco: It was not too soon.
01:09:14 Marco: It might have been too late, but it was not too soon.
01:09:16 Marco: And yeah, I mean, this is, if anything, I think this is, I mean, first of all, yeah, probably long overdue.
01:09:23 Marco: But second of all, this might help usher in the post iTunes era.
01:09:28 Marco: Because one of the biggest reasons that iTunes has to keep existing is because it's the only way to sync music onto iPods.
01:09:35 Marco: So maybe this will help that.
01:09:37 Marco: I don't know.
01:09:37 Marco: I mean, I know this is up there with like the Mac App Store rewrite as incredibly unlikely predictions I've made recently.
01:09:45 Marco: But I don't know that they if they're going to do it, they have to lay the groundwork to finally like fix slash replace iTunes.
01:09:53 Marco: And one of the biggest ways to do that is, first of all, get rid of the need for it to ever run on Windows.
01:09:59 Marco: And then second of all, get rid of the need for it to sync iPods.
01:10:01 Marco: And if you can do those things, which are related, you can clear out a lot of the need for it to hold on to all this old cruft.
01:10:10 John: There was a leak related to that, actually.
01:10:11 John: I think it was actually a macOS leak.
01:10:13 John: Some sort of thing in macOS that was like, oh, you know, quick looking on a video or something was like, open this in movies or something like that instead of open in iTunes, right?
01:10:24 John: It was like...
01:10:25 John: a string for a dialog box thing that opened it in one of apple's incredibly boringly named applications like there's no more itunes now we have an application called movies and an application called podcasts and an application called music and that is totally what apple would do because they're super boring names anyway um that's coming we all know something like that is coming and you're right getting rid of the ipods does does help it what if they don't use those boring names what if they pull a plan into the apps and they call every single one of the new apps apple music
01:10:53 John: yeah that would make just as much sense as uh as tv shows on apple music well they did call it audio os2 they have they always have to have every time they solve quote-unquote solve a naming problem by like aligning the stupid capitalization of all their os's to be worse uniformly worse then they make a new crisis of naming which is like you know audio os and apple music with tv shows on it but they'll sort it out yeah so i don't know what the timeline is on those things uh seems like a lot to bite off but i'm you know
01:11:21 John: Even though it is totally fine to get rid of the iPods like their time has come, there are still people who miss things about them.
01:11:28 John: And, you know, not that I miss the products specifically, but I miss Apple being in that market.
01:11:34 John: So what kind of market are we talking about?
01:11:36 John: Well, a lot of people have been writing about missing the Shuffle because it's just so darn small.
01:11:39 John: And some people don't want to strap a phone to them.
01:11:41 John: And they're like, oh, I just got an Apple Watch.
01:11:43 John: The watch is the new Shuffle, right?
01:11:45 John: You don't, you know, you just wear your watch and it does so much more than the Shuffle does.
01:11:49 John: The Shuffle is kind of like...
01:11:51 John: uh being in some of the same markets as fitbit and make an incredibly cheap thing that you don't mind too much when you put it through the washing machine it does one simple thing well now that hasn't been the shuffle a long time it's done one simple thing not really well because getting music on it was super pain but imagine something that was similar form factor and price to the ipod shuffle
01:12:12 John: But you never needed to connect to iTunes.
01:12:14 John: They did everything wirelessly and it synced with all your music.
01:12:19 John: People would buy that for $50.
01:12:20 John: Apple doesn't want to be in the market to sell you that little turd for $50.
01:12:24 John: They stayed in it much longer than anyone thought they would.
01:12:27 John: Who knows how cheaply they can manufacture those things now.
01:12:30 John: But...
01:12:30 John: It's kind of a shame that Apple doesn't want to go that far down.
01:12:33 John: They just want to sell you glass rectangles of varying sizes.
01:12:36 John: The smallest one they're going to make so far is going to be on your watch, and it's probably great for everybody.
01:12:40 John: But the Apple Watch is not the same market as the $50 piece of crap electronic thing that you just clip onto your clothes that is incredibly lightweight and that has access to all of your music effortlessly.
01:12:52 John: So I hope to see the return of the shuffle.
01:12:56 John: If the Apple Watch continues to be successful five years from now or whatever,
01:13:00 John: Either the watch gets super cheap and travels down to that segment or some other, you know, some other thing, some other sort of, you can find it in a box of cereal, incredibly cheap.
01:13:11 John: Don't really worry about it too much, but also incredibly light and also empowered by Apple's sort of ecosystem.
01:13:17 John: Like all the stuff they have, all your podcasts, your music, and you know, all the, all the cloud stuff.
01:13:22 John: I mean, they're talking about adding cellular to the Apple watch, which we talked about many years ago as an inevitability.
01:13:29 John: You know, a tiny iPod shuffle that has access to your entire library of music and podcasts.
01:13:34 John: It also has cell access that costs 50 bucks.
01:13:37 John: Like, I would love that product in 10, 15 years.
01:13:39 John: So I hope not that the iPod comes back, but that that form factor come back and that Apple doesn't resign, doesn't continue to travel up market without remembering they can also extend down market as well.
01:13:51 Marco: i think ultimately the the biggest problem and probably the reason why this was killed and why this doesn't exist yeah hops is crying outside my door let me let him in hold on so i had a tough love i febrorized my dog he's whining out there she's whining out there and you know just just wait it out eventually she'll all right hold on we put him in airplane mode what does that even mean taking off his collar so when he shakes it's quiet
01:14:17 Casey: I want to make fun of you so badly for that, but that is genius.
01:14:24 Marco: All right.
01:14:24 Marco: So I think one of the reasons why they killed the iPods now and why I think, John, your hope for a shuffle is totally futile.
01:14:33 Marco: It's not like 15 years.
01:14:35 Marco: Come on, cut me a break here.
01:14:36 Marco: I'm not like I'm having to come back tomorrow.
01:14:38 Marco: First of all, I have owned shuffles.
01:14:40 Marco: I think my first two iPods were shuffles, and I was not as big of a fan as you are of them.
01:14:50 Marco: But I think that the big problem now, and one of the reasons why they could probably do this now and kill all the iPods now, is I think it's easy for people like us, basically old computer nerds,
01:15:03 Marco: to overestimate how many people actually still maintain their own music collections.
01:15:08 Marco: These days, streaming is so popular.
01:15:11 Marco: It is the default of what everyone does.
01:15:14 Marco: So many people either never built up a music collection or...
01:15:18 Marco: have abandoned it you know years ago for streaming services that i think the whole idea of a music player that you sync a collection of you know drm free locally stored files that you sync those onto this music player and bring it with you somewhere i think that whole idea has had its day and it's done and i don't think it's coming back
01:15:40 John: That's not related to the form factor.
01:15:42 John: I said it would have to have cell access and have access to the cloud stuff that includes Apple Music, that includes Spotify, right?
01:15:48 Marco: Well, then that's a cellular Apple Watch, basically.
01:15:50 Marco: And they might be allegedly making that.
01:15:52 John: Right, but it's not a watch.
01:15:53 John: It's not a watch and it's not going to be $300, like a $50 thing.
01:15:57 John: Then it's a phone.
01:15:58 John: That you can connect to all your cloud stuff to and your podcast, which aren't the same as, you know, you could stream your podcast, that's fine, but you still have to know what podcast you subscribe to.
01:16:05 John: Anyway, all the existing cloud stuff, the existing cloud stuff is Apple Music,
01:16:10 John: you know, iTunes match your iCloud music library, your podcasts, Spotify, everything like that, all those ecosystems, even if it just did like, okay, like the watch does now, like, well, the watch can't get there by itself, but it can go on wifi and it can talk to your phone or whatever.
01:16:27 John: Um, they, the whole point is they don't want to sell something that's 50 bucks that you can listen to music and podcasts on regardless of how you do it.
01:16:34 John: Cause they just, they're, you know, you can't technologically do what I'm describing right now because it would cost more than 50 bucks.
01:16:39 John: Um,
01:16:39 John: And the $50 thing they have now sucks because it's so hard to get the music onto it.
01:16:44 John: And it's so hard to use, right?
01:16:45 John: So I'm just hoping they come back to that.
01:16:46 John: When technology catches up, I hope they don't say, well, you got to buy a watch.
01:16:49 John: And the watch always starts at $199.
01:16:50 John: Like, it never goes below that because, you know, Apple and prices that just keep going up market.
01:16:55 John: I hope they extend back down.
01:16:56 John: Because it's kind of like the iPod accidentally ended up $50 or whatever the shuffles were.
01:17:02 John: Because the first shuffle was, what, $99 or something like that?
01:17:04 John: Yeah, it was $100, yeah.
01:17:06 Marco: $120 if you wanted more capacity, I think.
01:17:08 John: yeah like in a rare case of it becoming cheaper cheaper to make this type of thing it just so happened that the price dropped down and people didn't care about it you know it's one of those cases where even apple couldn't fight against the fact that this thing was incredibly cheap to make i wonder how much the shuffle that they were selling for whatever they were selling for actually cost them to manufacture the margins were probably big but they probably sold none of them so who cares um but that that's what's happening with all electronics that's why the watch is going to get cellular because eventually you can do that that fits in that form factor and in that price
01:17:38 John: that will eventually happen for something like a shuffle and so i hope when that does happen that apple revisits that um especially as they expand out their ecosystem like they're doing it with the phone diversifying the phone to make a big one a small one now they're gonna make a big one a small one and a medium expensive one like there's always room like they always said they're not gonna leave a price umbrella it's just that apple loves to
01:18:01 John: go upwards like oh we can make it even more expensive phone let's make it bigger and add 100 bucks let's make it all glass and add another 100 bucks like that's that's totally the apple way to do and that's great and they should do that they should also make a really expensive mac pro that we'll all potentially buy but the other direction like don't just accidentally land there
01:18:16 John: I've revisited in many years when you can make the shuffle that I was describing because I think they can sell a lot of those things enough to make it worth their while.
01:18:29 John: And people do like them.
01:18:31 John: They don't like the old shuffle because now it's outdated.
01:18:33 John: But if they made a new one that did all that stuff, a lot of people would buy them.
01:18:36 John: And I say this mostly because I see people with Fitbits, which Fitbits would do almost nothing.
01:18:40 John: and a junkie and people put through the wash all the time, but I see a ton of them.
01:18:44 John: So I think there is a market for so cheap you don't worry about it too much wearables that do something useful.
01:18:53 Marco: Yeah, there is in general, but I think there's a lot more of that in the fitness community than there is in the audio playback market.
01:19:00 Marco: I think when you're looking at just having a small audio player,
01:19:05 Marco: The shuffle did make sense for a while as a thing that existed in the lineup.
01:19:09 Marco: Again, I will stand by the fact that it was never good, but it made sense to exist and sell, and it was fine for certain uses.
01:19:17 Marco: But now you're starting from a place where, by default, you assume everyone has a phone.
01:19:25 Marco: And then – so what you're saying is basically like – or like the case that a shuffle would have to make is not I need something that can play music on the go because your phone is that thing and you already have that.
01:19:37 Marco: So that's effectively free for you.
01:19:38 Marco: Like there's no additional cost for you to have music on the go.
01:19:40 Marco: You already have that with your phone.
01:19:42 Marco: And so now it's, well, if you want to buy something else, something smaller that you can clip onto your body, maybe because of certain types of workouts that you do, like running where you don't want to strap a phone to you or, you know, something like that.
01:19:58 Marco: Well, then their answer is the watch.
01:20:00 Marco: Then their answer is, well, if you're doing these things, we already have something small that can play music and clip to your body.
01:20:06 Marco: It's better than anything.
01:20:07 Marco: It's better than any shuffle ever made because you don't have to clip it to some part of your clothing.
01:20:13 Marco: You just strap it on your wrist in a location that people are totally fine wearing things most of the time.
01:20:18 Marco: And there's no wires.
01:20:20 Marco: You can't plug a wire into it even if you wanted to.
01:20:22 Marco: So you don't have a headphone wire that you have to route somewhere along your arm or strap it down or through your shirt or anything like that.
01:20:27 Marco: You could just use Bluetooth.
01:20:29 Marco: Oh, you would have to work with the AirPods.
01:20:31 Marco: Right, exactly.
01:20:32 Marco: But the Shuffle would do that too.
01:20:34 Marco: Yes, but if you're saying, like, Apple should sell a small, inexpensive, wearable device that you can sync music to in a modern way that can run modern apps and modern streaming services and can stream things to Bluetooth that's smaller than a phone, they do.
01:20:46 Marco: It's called the Apple Watch.
01:20:47 Marco: And I don't think it's ever going to get down to 50 bucks.
01:20:50 John: I already said that.
01:20:50 John: I already said, like, they could...
01:20:52 John: if the way they can get to that market is by making a $50 Apple watch, that's fine.
01:20:55 John: But if they never want the Apple watch to go down to 50 bucks, what I'm saying is there's still a place for them to put something like that.
01:21:00 John: If they don't put it this way, if they don't do it in a Fitbit is still in business, Fitbit will make this because Fitbit already sells you something that is small, lightweight, cheap, that does less than an Apple watch.
01:21:09 John: uh and eventually if they can sell something at that price uh and apple doesn't then fitbit will in the same way that fitbit will sell a thing that counts your steps that's much cheaper than an apple watch and apple thus far can't make an apple watch if that's cheap because it's too complicated right so they could you know i'm just saying like don't don't leave this market out and i'm saying not to do it with the watch because thus far apple has made the watch to be
01:21:33 John: not upscale like the edition days are behind us, but they're still making the ceramic ones and they're all about fashion and, and fanciness.
01:21:41 John: It seems to me that there is less of an appetite to bring the Apple watch down to 50 bucks, even if they can technically.
01:21:46 John: So that leaves the room for, if they don't want to do that, and if they don't want Fitbit to sell that thing, leaves room to bring back something like the shuffle in the future.
01:21:55 John: That is essentially a dis, an Apple watch without a strap and maybe without a screen on it, even if you want to make it super cheap.
01:22:01 John: Um,
01:22:02 John: We can all agree, though, that no one is crying for the iPod Nano because that is a product without a home.
01:22:10 Marco: And that was so good for so long, but that time has long passed.
01:22:16 Casey: Yeah, my first Apple products, if memory serves, were the original iPod Shuffle that looked like a stick of gum or a pack of gum, I guess I should say.
01:22:24 Casey: And then following that, an iPod Nano, the one that was really easy to scratch the back of.
01:22:29 Casey: And I think there was like a class action lawsuit or something like that.
01:22:31 John: Scratch the front, not the back, the front.
01:22:33 Casey: What's the front?
01:22:33 John: Okay.
01:22:34 John: Yeah.
01:22:34 Casey: Right.
01:22:34 Casey: Well, either way, those were my first two Apple products.
01:22:38 Casey: Yeah.
01:22:38 Casey: I think I have a similar reaction to everyone or a lot of people, which is, well, that kind of sucks, but no, actually it doesn't because who's really buying these anymore anyway?
01:22:49 Casey: So, yeah.
01:22:50 Casey: And they also, did we already mention that the capacity bumped the iPod Touch as well, which is nice.
01:22:54 John: Yeah, but nobody cares.
01:22:56 Casey: Fair.
01:22:56 John: John, you would have cared.
01:22:58 Casey: I know.
01:22:59 John: Yeah, well, no.
01:23:00 John: They, you know, it is even worse than iPhone SE users now.
01:23:03 John: The iPod Touch has been so left behind.
01:23:05 John: That's why I had to leave it.
01:23:06 John: Like, it was just all, you know.
01:23:07 John: Getting a phone because I was going to get a phone, but they updated it forever.
01:23:11 John: They bumped the capacities but left the prices the same, but it's still overpriced.
01:23:15 John: The problem... It's not super expensive, but for what's in it... I find it hard to recommend that product.
01:23:23 John: I suppose if you want to get something for your kid and it's still cheaper than an iPad, but I find it really hard to recommend that product at the current price and capabilities.
01:23:34 John: If they want...
01:23:35 John: If they don't want to can the iPod Touch, which apparently they don't want to do because they could have just canned it now, they need to get it on a slightly better upgrade cycle.
01:23:47 John: I mean, I guess they're not motivated to do that because it's like the Mac Mini of the iOS line.
01:23:52 John: It's like, well, it's a product that exists in our lineup and people do buy it and it fills a role, but we're not killing ourselves to make a new one.
01:23:59 John: So it's got the A8 in it now.
01:24:01 John: Like, when the A12 is out, can we update the iPod Touch again?
01:24:04 John: Oh, we'll give you a capacity bump.
01:24:06 John: Like, come on.
01:24:07 John: If you're going to have it, maybe update it every once in a while.
01:24:10 John: That's all I'm saying.
01:24:11 Marco: It's also interesting how it fits now in the lineup.
01:24:14 Marco: So you have the iPod Touch at, what, $200 even?
01:24:17 Marco: Is that the base?
01:24:17 Marco: Yeah, I think so.
01:24:18 Marco: Then you have, at $329, the new cheap iPad.
01:24:22 Marco: Seems like you're getting way more.
01:24:24 Marco: Exactly.
01:24:24 Marco: You get way more with the iPad.
01:24:26 Marco: And then...
01:24:27 Marco: At $400, you have the iPhone SE, which if you still want a small device, that is, you're getting way more for the iPhone SE than you are with an iPod Touch at $200.
01:24:36 Marco: Now, granted, I've now doubled the price, but I feel like any discussion of what the iPod Touch should or shouldn't have or shouldn't be updated or how it should be priced has to also then consider how it fits in with these other low-end, inexpensive iOS devices.
01:24:52 John: Yeah, I mean, it is kind of, you know, people say, like, oh, all the real iPods are on.
01:24:55 John: The iPod Touch was never really an iPod.
01:24:57 John: It was an iPod, a name only.
01:24:58 John: But now it is, it's actually filling the role of the iPod.
01:25:02 John: Because why in the world would, like, say you're going to get a kid, you know, it's going to get a kid, so they're not going to have a phone.
01:25:07 John: You don't want to, this kid doesn't have a cell number.
01:25:08 John: This kid is six years old, right?
01:25:10 John: You want to get them an iOS device.
01:25:12 John: You're going to get that kid the iPad, right?
01:25:14 John: Unless...
01:25:15 John: What the kid actually wants is a music player because the iPad is not a great music player to carry around with you at school or whatever.
01:25:22 John: Like say the kid is 11 or 12 and maybe doesn't want to have a phone yet, right?
01:25:25 John: Or the parents don't want to pay for a cell data plan.
01:25:27 John: So any kind of iPhone is out because they're not paying for a cell data plan.
01:25:31 John: It's a waste to buy an iPhone and pay that extra expense for something.
01:25:33 John: It's not going to be a phone.
01:25:35 John: uh but a kid would still rather have an ipad to watch youtube on and stuff too unless they want to carry it around at school and listen to music or whatever they would run with it or you know take it with them to camp or whatever it's a music player as the only the only advantages has is small size everything else about is a disadvantage like because the price is too close to the to the cheap ipad it's really slow the the storage capacity so it's kind of weird that the ipod touch is now is now actually living up to its ipod name because literal only reason for existence
01:26:04 John: And any sensible thing is to fill the role of a non-phone thing that you can also get access to all of your, you know, and I suppose text messages if you have Wi-Fi.
01:26:15 John: But it is more iPod-like than it has ever been before, which is kind of depressing because it, you know, as I pointed out many times, was once the fastest iPhone OS device you could buy for a brief moment in time.
01:26:26 John: Those days are long gone.
01:26:27 Casey: That was John's favorite brief moment in time.
01:26:31 Marco: Also, I feel like probably a big part of the market for the iPod Touch, in addition to being eaten alive by the low-end iPad, has probably also been eaten alive by the increasing numbers of people who just give old iPhones to kids.
01:26:45 Casey: That's a good point.
01:26:46 Marco: I now know a bunch of parents of young children in that age range where they could have an iOS device, but you don't want to give them a good one.
01:26:55 Marco: And I don't know any of them that have an iPod Touch.
01:26:58 Marco: They're all using their parents' old iPhones.
01:27:00 Marco: It's iPhone 4Ss and stuff like that, of that age range, or maybe an iPhone 5.
01:27:06 Marco: Yeah.
01:27:06 Marco: And they're all using those.
01:27:08 Marco: And so, like, granted, not everybody keeps their old devices.
01:27:11 Marco: A lot of people trade them in or sell them to help fund the new ones.
01:27:14 Marco: But I bet a lot of people who have children of this age range, they just give them what they already have in a drawer somewhere, which is a few years old iPhone.
01:27:25 John: I mean, maybe it's a little bit cheaper.
01:27:27 John: I'm trying to think of why didn't we do that with all our kids.
01:27:29 John: I mean, from the beginning, it was because I had the old iPod Touches on them.
01:27:33 John: But we actually did buy two brand new iPod Touches.
01:27:37 John: We ran out of my old supply of iPod Touches, right?
01:27:40 John: But the kids still wanted something that was better and faster.
01:27:42 John: You know, my old iPod Touches were too crappy for them, which they really were at that point.
01:27:46 John: We had the choice.
01:27:47 John: We could have said, well, why don't we take, you know, the old iPhone 4S and give it to one of the kids?
01:27:52 John: Or we could just buy a brand new iPod Touch.
01:27:55 John: And we ended up buying a new iPod Touch.
01:27:58 John: Twice we did that for a variety of reasons.
01:28:01 John: Because it was cheap, because it's new, because the battery will be fresh.
01:28:04 John: All the kind of reasons that you might... For us, when we had access to both of them, we could have gone either way on it.
01:28:11 John: So I don't think it's always a slam dunk, but...
01:28:14 John: It depends on how often you upgrade your phones.
01:28:16 John: If you upgrade your phone every year, you have a much greater supply of reasonable-ish iPhones to go through.
01:28:22 John: Also, some people might want to resell their iPhones.
01:28:24 John: If you do upgrade every year, you can get some good money for reselling your iPhone, and maybe that makes up the cost of the iPod Touch.
01:28:30 John: Anyway, I'm sure they're not selling too many of these, but they don't break that out for us.
01:28:34 John: But they did keep it around, just like the Mac Mini, so we'll keep our eye on it.
01:28:38 John: iPod Touch Death Watch begins now.
01:28:43 John: oh my goodness and speaking of death watches uh flash is on the verge of dead like for real for real flashes this is another one of those things where the correct response is they were still making flash yeah i could tell they were still making flash because i still come across websites that require flash or don't work right or complain that my version of flash is up to date i'm like still really what is what is this website why do you want me to have flash i just want to see some video what century are we in
01:29:10 John: Um, but the reason this is a story is because Adobe, the makers of flash are saying, we're not going to do that anymore.
01:29:18 John: Nice.
01:29:18 John: So finally, like you have no choice.
01:29:20 John: People who continue to make websites with flash soon, you will not be able to get flash or flash plugin that works in modern browsers because Adobe is not going to spend more time developing it and blah, blah, blah.
01:29:31 John: So, um,
01:29:31 John: truly only adobe could really ever kill flash because if they continued to make it and sell it as again a product in their lineup some people buy it and use it and force you to have it for their websites and those are bad people and so i'm glad adobe's putting an end to this how do you really feel
01:29:48 Marco: Thanks to our three sponsors this week, Casper, Squarespace, and Audible.
01:29:53 Marco: And we will see you next week.
01:29:57 Marco: Now the show is over.
01:29:59 Marco: They didn't even mean to begin.
01:30:01 Marco: Because it was accidental.
01:30:04 Marco: Oh, it was accidental.
01:30:07 Marco: John didn't do any research.
01:30:10 Marco: Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
01:30:15 Marco: It was accidental.
01:30:18 John: And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
01:30:23 Marco: And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
01:30:32 Casey: So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R
01:30:48 Casey: So John, how was your beach vacation?
01:30:59 Marco: I really want to hear more about this.
01:31:01 John: It's the same as it always is.
01:31:02 John: I always go down to Long Island for, it's usually just a week.
01:31:05 John: This time it was almost two weeks because reasons.
01:31:10 John: And we took the dog with us this time.
01:31:13 John: We've gone down there with the dog before, but that was our other dog.
01:31:16 John: And he was much better behaved than this little monster.
01:31:20 John: Well, she's still a puppy, though.
01:31:21 John: Yeah, I know.
01:31:22 John: He was a much older dog.
01:31:24 John: But we survived.
01:31:26 John: We had pretty okay weather.
01:31:27 John: Took a lot of pictures.
01:31:30 John: Filled up a lot of memory cards.
01:31:34 John: Filled up my wife's iMac.
01:31:37 John: We came back home.
01:31:38 John: She got that warning that macOS will give you that says your disk is running low in space.
01:31:43 John: Which is never a good warning to get because macOS, like so many Unixes before it, does not behave well when it runs out of disk space.
01:31:50 John: things get very bad very quickly so i had to come home and well i try to delete a bunch of pictures but then you got to go into recently deleted and delete them and you know i did as much picture deleting as i could but the bottom line is pictures don't pictures only accumulate essentially you know you just keep taking more of them and you don't delete the old ones
01:32:07 John: And I have been more worthless in deleting them than I have in the past.
01:32:12 John: Not just out of focus or bad ones, but just like, you know, just deleting everything except for the ones I think are decent.
01:32:19 John: But then I had to go through her computer and delete a bunch of other stuff too.
01:32:21 John: So pull out Disk Inventory X. I looked for alternatives.
01:32:24 John: I know there's a whole bunch of alternatives that people like.
01:32:26 John: People like Daisy Disk, Grand Perspective is a Disk Inventory X lookalike type program.
01:32:31 John: Space Gremlin is my favorite.
01:32:33 John: Oh, I didn't know about that one.
01:32:33 John: I got to check that one out.
01:32:34 John: It's fairly hideous, but it's pretty functional.
01:32:37 John: I like the tree map view, the big rectangle.
01:32:41 John: I like Disk Inventory X. I'm concerned that it's not being maintained, and it sometimes does some weird stuff that bothers me a little bit, so that's why I just downloaded Grand Perspective.
01:32:49 John: But anyway, if you've never used one of these programs, or Omnidisc Sweeper, or Daisy Disc, whichever one you want, when you're trying to free up disk space, this is the way to do it.
01:32:58 John: Get a program that will...
01:32:59 John: show you somehow all the stuff that's on your disk and find the big things and don't spend a year going through a million tiny files to figure out what to delete delete like three big ones right and that that'll do it so deleted a bunch of games from steam i moved my itunes backups to a different volume
01:33:16 John: Yes.
01:33:16 Marco: Speaking of things you can safely delete with this new modern age, iTunes device backups are huge.
01:33:25 Marco: Most people have no idea that they're even still keeping those if they don't use them anymore.
01:33:28 Marco: And they take up tons of disk space.
01:33:31 Marco: So that's a number one hit is like you've got to get rid of those iTunes backups.
01:33:35 Marco: Also, if you're a developer, Xcode keeps around all sorts of support files for old simulators and old devices that you probably don't use anymore.
01:33:42 Marco: The Xcode developer directory is always a great source of clearing out stuff.
01:33:47 John: I still keep the iTunes device backups just because it's still, even with the crappiness of iTunes, slightly the fastest and most convenient way to restore a kid's device that got totally hosed.
01:33:58 John: um so i keep them around i didn't want to delete them all i delete obviously all the old ones that for a device i don't use it but i just move them to a different volume that i don't that isn't backed up that i don't like if i lose them oh well like there are these are all the devices are all backed up to icloud right so i just have local itunes backups you know it's just convenient because the encrypted backups i have all the passwords although i think they added that to the icloud backups too now didn't they anyway more backups is good so i didn't want to delete them i just moved them what else did i delete
01:34:24 Marco: Well, the trick now is, so if you want the passwords and stuff to be saved, they're still excluded from iCloud backups, but iCloud Keychain now exists.
01:34:34 Marco: So the official word of how you're supposed to do this is to use iCloud Keychain also in addition to iCloud backups, and then you will have those things work.
01:34:43 John: So that saved a lot of space.
01:34:44 John: I ended up freeing up like 130 gigs or something, which gave me a little bit more breathing room.
01:34:49 John: But you look at the Disk Inventory X like giant rectangle picture and it's just a huge rectangle.
01:34:55 John: It is my photo library.
01:34:57 John: And there's a little skinny row with a bunch of tiny little things that is everything else on the system.
01:35:02 John: And what can you do?
01:35:02 John: Like I got the biggest, you know, it's a, it's a one terabyte drive and her iMac.
01:35:06 John: And that's the time we moved, you know, we moved the photos from an external drive to an internal one.
01:35:11 John: It's so much more convenient and fast, obviously to have everything in one volume before I had this even more complicated backup scheme where I had, you know, her internal drive on her old computer, but then also my external photos drive.
01:35:23 John: And then you have to do like, it just doubles the amount of backup headaches that you have to do.
01:35:26 John: And yeah,
01:35:27 John: I like having it all at one, but at this point, you know, when we replace this iMac, I'm going to get her one with a two terabyte disc, um, or I'm going to move the iPhoto library to my Mac pro with the four terabyte internal SSD, whatever the hell I'm going to get in my fantasy world.
01:35:42 Marco: That's actually that's that's a non not crazy way to do it like one one of the little hacks I recently decided to try was I have you know my iMac and then a laptop and they have one terabyte each because that was like the most you get on the iMac at the time and so I got that.
01:35:57 Marco: But I'm pushing that.
01:35:58 Marco: So like on the iMac, a couple of years ago now, I bought a little external Samsung SSD and I moved over.
01:36:06 Marco: It's very, very easy to have iTunes and Apple Photos store their giant libraries anywhere else, like on an external drive or anything.
01:36:15 Marco: It's very easy to do that.
01:36:16 Marco: Like you don't have to do any kind of weird SimLink trick or anything.
01:36:19 Marco: You can just tell it, I'm now moving this here.
01:36:22 Marco: And it just works for both Photos and iTunes.
01:36:24 Marco: Yeah.
01:36:24 Marco: And so and because of such big things for most people, you know, that's like number one hit rate to move.
01:36:31 Marco: But one thing I started doing now with photos is I signed it.
01:36:35 Marco: So I have this Mac mini server at home.
01:36:38 Marco: It's like a little home utility server.
01:36:40 Marco: Among other things, it usually runs a live stream for the show.
01:36:42 Marco: It also hosts a giant iSCSI volume on my NAS.
01:36:47 Marco: And I would not honestly recommend doing iSCSI.
01:36:50 Marco: It's too much of a pain.
01:36:51 Marco: If I were starting fresh today, I wouldn't do it.
01:36:54 Marco: But what I would do is just plug in a couple of giant external hard drives to that Mac Mini, which would serve the same function.
01:37:01 Marco: So anyway, so I have this Mac Mini that thinks it has a whole bunch of locally attached storage.
01:37:06 Marco: So one thing I've started doing now is I signed in to Photos app on that Mac Mini,
01:37:13 Marco: And I'm having it keep a local copy of 100% quality of everything.
01:37:18 Marco: So now, I can safely, if I want to, I'm not sure if I will, but if I want to now, I can have future computers not keep my entire photo library on them, and therefore maybe I don't need to buy the giant expensive 2TB or future 4TB options.
01:37:36 Marco: Now, maybe I could get...
01:37:37 Marco: quote only the one or two terabyte ssds built in so that now because i have this other mac this other mac mini in my house that is keeping a full resolution copy of everything locally and you know the third option is you could just trust cloud backup i don't like that option so so i still have this thing locally i still have everything locally like in my house but it's hard to you know because once as you said john like once you add photos to your life you
01:38:03 Marco: You're basically going to keep paying for that storage forever.
01:38:06 Marco: Like, you know, every computer you buy, you're going to have to get the bigger and bigger disk each time.
01:38:11 Marco: And you're going to have to keep paying that giant SSD tax over and over and over again every time you buy a computer.
01:38:17 Marco: So one way to solve it is see if there's some kind of clever way you can use other or different or cheaper hard drive space in your house.
01:38:26 Marco: and so for me having the mac mini signed into photos app and having having that download the originals then frees up the other computers to have it do the optimized storage thing and uh so yeah that it's one option this could be crazy i don't know but it seemed reasonable when i set it up no i mean i did the same thing i have another mac that signed in with a one terabyte disc you know that does the thing but the thing is i just don't like in the same way that raid is not a backup solution i don't consider that a backup like it's good to have it
01:38:51 John: But I would never turn on optimized storage on my iMac because I need one canonical location, and I want that backed up the old-fashioned way, you know, three times.
01:38:59 John: Time machine to two separate disks, cloud backup, and also super-duper clone.
01:39:03 John: Like, the photos are the most important thing that I back up.
01:39:06 John: So...
01:39:07 John: I want them in more places, not fewer.
01:39:09 John: So I never I'm never going to uncheck.
01:39:11 John: I'm never going to check that optimized storage box, even though like I did this.
01:39:14 John: That's what I did on vacation.
01:39:15 John: I took a laptop with me on vacation with a one terabyte drive.
01:39:18 John: Right.
01:39:18 John: And so I'm taking the picture signed into the same account, my wife's account like I made on this laptop.
01:39:23 John: And I'm doing all the pictures there and doing all the edits and everything and deleting and favoriting and doing all the stuff.
01:39:29 John: And then I come back home and the whole time I'm leaving my laptop open all night long, like to upload, you know, the iCloud photo stuff.
01:39:35 John: Right.
01:39:35 John: And then I come home and look at her iMac and all the pictures and all the edits that I did on vacation are basically there, except for a few stragglers.
01:39:42 John: And then I leave both computers like on and connected to Wi-Fi for a couple, you know, for like eight hours to make sure, okay, guys, we're all in sync now.
01:39:49 John: Because at this point...
01:39:50 John: My photos are only on the laptop.
01:39:54 John: Like I've had to overwrite.
01:39:55 John: I brought two SD cards with me, but I had to overwrite one of them.
01:39:58 John: Right.
01:39:59 John: So I don't even have the SD cards as the backup.
01:40:01 John: Photos are only on the laptop and the laptop is pushing up to the cloud.
01:40:05 John: And then I want them to be pulled down from the cloud onto what's supposed to be my canonical computer, which is the iMac.
01:40:10 John: only after i'm 100 sure that no one is doing any syncing and everyone is all on the same page and everyone's got all the original quality images on two computers and they're backed up 100 times only then can i turn on optimized storage on the the laptop or more likely i'm just gonna you know delete that account on the laptop or whatever because it's a temporary thing but i'm really like i the thing with mac mini i would love to have a solution like that if i had the disk space and another mac to throw at it
01:40:34 John: Uh, but in general, I don't, I want my backup.
01:40:37 John: I want backups to use different software than the regular functioning of stuff.
01:40:41 John: I think for a while I also had it on my Mac, on my Mac pro, the same thing with optimized storage on, but optimized storage is too, too blunt of an instrument.
01:40:49 John: Like I wanted to, I want some control of the optimized storage.
01:40:53 John: I don't want it to be like, we'll almost fill your desk and then back off.
01:40:55 John: I would love to say optimized storage and never get bigger than X size, right?
01:41:01 John: Or I don't know, something to let me have more control.
01:41:03 Marco: Or, like, keep the originals for the last X months or years.
01:41:07 John: Yeah, exactly.
01:41:07 Marco: Before that, you can start archiving, you know, stuff like that.
01:41:10 Marco: But also, to clarify, by the way, that Mac Mini that hosts this full-size library, everything it has is also backed up to Backblaze.
01:41:18 Marco: Yeah.
01:41:19 Marco: So there are always people in the chat asking, so I figured, let me save myself a week of email.
01:41:24 Marco: Just say that's also backed up.
01:41:26 Marco: Too late.
01:41:26 John: Yeah.
01:41:27 John: That's why it's iSCSI, because the Backblaze doesn't do network disks, so you need to, you know, direct-attached storage.
01:41:32 Marco: That's exactly it.
01:41:33 Marco: Yeah, and I have a feeling I don't think Photos.app would appreciate being on a network disk either.
01:41:39 Marco: Anyway, yeah, if I were starting over, honestly, if I were starting over today with, like, large storage like this, I would not get a NAS.
01:41:46 Marco: I would just get, I would just have, like, have another Mac somewhere or another computer somewhere in your house that's, you know, small spec, inexpensive, and just plug in a few large external hard drives and call it a day.
01:41:58 Marco: Because then you can have things like Backblaze backing it up.
01:42:01 Marco: and i have found that i don't you know unlike casey like casey you you use crazy cool features of the nast like with its built-in apps i use none of them in practice like i the the nast to me is just a giant external hard drive box you don't even use plex on it no i i use plex on that mac mini actually
01:42:18 Casey: Yeah, that's the same setup I have on my iMac.
01:42:21 Casey: So I don't use Plex on the device.
01:42:22 Casey: But I mean, I don't really do that much with the Synology, although I didn't want to interrupt John earlier, but I was surprised that you don't have the Synology hosting a VPN for you.
01:42:31 Casey: So you can like easily get to any device on your network and force all of those things to be uploaded.
01:42:38 John: My Synology is not accessible to the Internet.
01:42:40 John: Because it's a peace of mind thing, like Synology and other network attached.
01:42:46 John: I can't reach it.
01:42:46 John: No one can reach it from the internet.
01:42:48 John: I feel better that way.
01:42:49 Marco: I don't have any access to my home network from outside.
01:42:51 Marco: I have anything like any kind of dynamic DNS thing or any kind of forwarded screen sharing or VNC.
01:43:00 Marco: I have no access to my home network.
01:43:02 Marco: Anything I want to do that I want to access when I'm out on the go, I have to either access it through...
01:43:07 Marco: sync services like dropbox or if i really need something i can pull a file off a backblaze but that's it all right is that a good enough after show what was i gonna say there's one more thing about my setup that i was gonna say so john i guess your vacation went well i love it
01:43:23 John: how'd your vacation go here's all the stories about disk space in my photos library i mean i mean you know my vacation is like it's for the kids and everyone to go to the beach and hang out and you know me taking care of the dog this time is a little bit of added uh hassle and stress and lots of waking up early uh but i take a lot of pictures like i you know i just well i brought both cameras because you gotta have a backups but i just used my new sony camera didn't even use my super zoom at all the super zoom was just there just in case i dropped the sony in the ocean i successfully did not drop it in the ocean once again
01:43:52 John: Um, I brought a new zoom lens for it, which is a longer zoom, but a crappier lens, but it was cheap, uh, than I used last time.
01:44:00 John: And it was all right.
01:44:01 John: Um, I use most of the lenses I brought with me.
01:44:04 John: I took lots of pictures, got some good ones.
01:44:07 John: Uh, but that's a lot of my beach vacation stories.
01:44:08 John: I take a lot of pictures and then I edit them and mess with them and post a couple of them to Instagram.
01:44:15 John: Uh, in general, I don't post pictures of like pictures of my relatives who don't want to be featured on my Instagram.
01:44:19 John: and really don't post much pictures of my family though now that my kids are older i post a few pictures of them here and there um but yeah this is my the heaviest photography time of the year most if you look at when are the most pictures taken by far it's these one or two weeks that i'm long out like we'll come home from the ocean one day and i'll have 1600 pictures obviously i'm not keeping all those i'm deleting a lot of them but
01:44:39 John: That's what it looks like.
01:44:41 John: The secret to good photography, as far as I've been able to determine so far, is take a huge number of pictures and then delete most of them.
01:44:46 John: Yeah, the secret to good photography is lots of bad photography.
01:44:49 John: Yeah, so I'm definitely doing that.
01:44:51 John: What else lens-wise?
01:44:53 John: Yeah, I still don't have a really...
01:44:55 John: good zoom that i like because good zooms are really expensive and really heavy and it's like i'm just resigned to the fact that i will you know the smaller you know my my 50 millimeter prime is still my favorite lens but that's not going to cut it at the ocean and so as you as i get more flexible the image quality goes down and the size and weight go up
01:45:13 John: And I've mostly accepted that.
01:45:15 John: But I'm still pretty happy with my camera.
01:45:17 John: Got a lot of good shots out of it.
01:45:18 John: And like I said, didn't drop it in the ocean.
01:45:20 John: So that's key.
01:45:21 Marco: Yeah, I mean, they're basically there is no good zoom.
01:45:24 Marco: Like every zoom is a giant compromise and at least one factor.
01:45:29 Marco: Either you're compromising image quality severely in order to get something reasonably sized and reasonably inexpensive, or you are having really great image quality, but then the thing is massive and probably a pretty small zoom range and probably very expensive.
01:45:45 Marco: It's just impossible to make a great zoom lens that has a large range and is reasonably priced and is reasonably small.
01:45:55 Marco: You just can't do it.
01:45:57 John: Well, in one brief dog story.
01:45:58 John: So I've been training to come when called, like, you know, in adverse conditions when you really want it to happen.
01:46:05 John: Like, for example, when all the other dogs in the dog park run into the mud puddle and get covered head to toe in, you know, muddy water, right, and literally changes the color of the dog, and you don't want your dog to do that.
01:46:17 John: That's the time when you want to – and every dog wants to go to the mud puddle.
01:46:20 John: They all start heading there, and all the owners are like, no.
01:46:23 John: Yeah.
01:46:23 John: That's when you need the come when called thing to actually work.
01:46:28 John: I call my... I used that... Was it today?
01:46:31 John: Today or yesterday?
01:46:32 John: Exactly that happened.
01:46:33 John: You know, I told her to come.
01:46:35 John: She came.
01:46:36 John: It was exciting, right?
01:46:37 John: But I found the limits to that on vacation because she was out in the backyard and we let her loose for a little bit and she's wandering around.
01:46:42 John: Usually the worst she does is find rabbit turds and eat them because they're delicious.
01:46:46 John: Well, okay.
01:46:47 John: Yeah, they're delicious.
01:46:49 John: But this time she found a dead bird.
01:46:52 John: and i didn't know what she had found i saw her getting into something and i called her to come over and she comes running towards me she gets about three inches from my hand where i'm about to like grab her collar and i see the wing of the dead bird sticking out of her mouth it's not a small bird this is a pretty significant bird that's in her mouth that's like you know and she gets close to me and she sees that i'm going to reach for the collar and she's like i'm out turns the other direction and runs away as fast as she can
01:47:15 John: i run after her in a yard like i run after her i eventually catch up with her she as far as i can tell swallowed that bird whole like just so i couldn't you know i was ready to dig the thing out of her mouth like so many things that i dig out of my dog's mouth that i don't want her to have she just you know like full like python lizard just slurped down like whole dead bird beak feathers everything
01:47:39 John: That's dogs for you.
01:47:40 John: So she will come when called when all the other dogs are running to the mud puddle, but she gets a dead bird.
01:47:46 John: It's like I have made the mental calculation and whatever treat you're going to give me for coming when called does not match this dead bird.
01:47:52 John: So dead bird wins.

Nobody Cares But Me, But I Do Care

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