Irresponsible Use of Infinite Terabytes
Casey:
live from wednesday night it's atp i feel like if i had watched saturday night live more frequently i would have riffed on that whole announcer spiel you would have realized how badly he mangled the uh the quote and reference live from wednesday night from wednesday night live from new york they're definitely not from wednesday
Casey:
Fair enough.
John:
Or Saturday.
Casey:
I have some pre-show announcements, gentlemen.
Casey:
First of all, for the next few minutes, I'm a single parent.
Casey:
So it is possible that I will need to depart if Declan wakes up, as he has done recently, although usually at two or three in the morning, explaining to me that he doesn't want to be asleep and that he wants to be awake.
Marco:
Been there.
Casey:
So if I disappear momentarily, that would be why.
Casey:
And before any parents in the room email me to say, oh, you need a sleep to wake alarm, we have one.
Casey:
We have a nice little alarm clock that will turn green when it's time for him to wake up.
Casey:
And even though I think of him as a...
Casey:
Well, I was going to say reasonably smart kid, but you can't tell at almost three.
Casey:
So as a not moronic kid, even with that said, he seems to forget in the middle of the night that the green light is not yet on and that he needs to go the fuck to sleep, which, by the way, is a great bedtime story.
Marco:
So we have that same alarm.
Marco:
I have two other parent friends who have that same alarm for their two different children.
Marco:
All of the children regard that alarm as simply one input of many.
Casey:
Suggestion.
Casey:
Yeah, it's advice.
Marco:
The advice that says, hey, it's green, you might want to wake up now.
Marco:
But when it's not green, it's like, hey, well, I want to be up now and I want to go bother mom and dad.
Marco:
So it's like it is simply one input of many and they will choose to ignore it whenever they feel like it.
Marco:
It isn't a matter of your kid being smart or not smart.
Marco:
Your kid is perfectly smart enough.
John:
your kid is as smart as all the other kids who've had these same alarms and have said well it's not green but i don't care and it doesn't really matter so i'm gonna go in there anyway i think it worked on my son we of course have the same thing but we didn't even try it on my daughter because just personality wise it would be useless in fact we had to remove all clocks we still no clocks in her room we had to remove all clocks from her room because she would she would stare at them and be like
John:
you know whatever her bedtime was and like five minutes after and i'm still awake and then so she'd be there like it's it's 134 and i'm still awake it's 247 and i'm still she would just stare at it and and obsess about the fact that she's still awake so we had to remove all clocks from her and we haven't put them back yet that was years ago we haven't put them back yet probably we could but then again maybe not
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So he actually does do a pretty darn good job in the actual morning time when we really don't want him to get fussy or anything like that before it's time for him to get up.
Casey:
But in the middle of the night, like Marco said, it seems to be but a recommendation and nothing more.
Casey:
And so that's been the festivities of late.
Casey:
But that's actually not the big announcement.
Casey:
The big announcement is we have moved.
Casey:
And by we, I mean just me, and I mean just the office from one room in the house to another.
Marco:
Talk about burying the lead.
Casey:
Yeah, right?
Casey:
If I sound like garbage, don't blame Marco.
Casey:
Blame me.
Casey:
I've put up some sound deadening material on the wall directly behind my 27-inch reflective glass, but I may need more.
Casey:
Casey, for God's sake, why did you move?
Casey:
Well, because we need a place for a baby.
Marco:
Yes, okay.
Casey:
Congratulations.
Marco:
It's about damn time.
Marco:
You said it on the show.
Casey:
Yeah, so guess what?
Casey:
Aaron's pregnant, and that's super exciting.
Marco:
And based on your recent car purchase, we can conclude she's having sextuplets.
Marco:
Is that it?
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
Exactly right.
Casey:
Now, there's only one baby in there, as has been confirmed numerous times.
Casey:
But anyway, suffice to say, I've relocated rooms.
Casey:
This room is bigger, potentially more echoey, maybe less echoey.
Casey:
Who knows?
Casey:
So Marco may be really, really have some fun to do on this edit with what is the tool chain that has like the thing that magically erases John's air conditioner?
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, there's a number of tools that can do that that I have used in the past.
Marco:
Audacity has the most basic one for free.
Marco:
It's basically it's like a noise profile remover.
Marco:
So you select some of the recording that's just the noise you want to remove.
Marco:
Like when no one's talking, you just hear the background noise.
Marco:
And then you say, all right, profile this.
Marco:
And then you select the whole recording and say, remove that noise from this whole recording.
Marco:
So Audition does it.
Marco:
Audacity does it.
Marco:
The one I've been using most recently is the iZotope RX.
Casey:
That's it.
Marco:
Which has a number of other tools as well.
Marco:
And that thing is amazing.
Marco:
It is not cheap, but if you process audio and need to remove annoying background noise or echo or headphone bleed or hum or so many other things, I have not found anything better than iZotope RX.
Marco:
It is really something else.
Marco:
Well, congratulations on the reason you moved.
Marco:
And don't worry about the audio.
Marco:
We'll figure it out.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So, yeah, thanks.
Casey:
I forgot that we had talked about this on the post show.
Casey:
I think it was like the post, post, post, post show last week.
Casey:
And it didn't even cross my mind that that probably didn't make the released recording.
Casey:
So, yeah, guess what?
Casey:
Aaron's pregnant.
Casey:
And so far, everything and everyone seems healthy.
Casey:
And we're super excited about it.
Casey:
And we'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
With a little bit of background information about that and an adorable picture of Aaron and Declan.
John:
And for the people who are just going to listen to the podcast, the gender is sealed in an envelope and Casey and Aaron don't want to know.
John:
Did you open it already since last week?
Casey:
No, we haven't opened yet.
Casey:
Did you see a clue on a sonogram or something?
Casey:
Well, no.
Casey:
But when we were told to turn around so the technician can figure out what the gender was, that took suspiciously little time.
Casey:
So we'll see.
Casey:
That indicates to me that it was a suspiciously short amount of time to prove a negative.
Casey:
But you never know.
Casey:
So we'll see what happens.
Casey:
My...
Casey:
kind of farmer's almanac tale or my experience which is 150 anecdotal and i recognize that is that if if the woman tends to carry all of the baby like in the tummy area and doesn't seem to get any bigger anywhere else that seems to generally speaking be a boy amongst the friends of ours this is not completely anti-scientific no no no this is science in any way
John:
no no there's no science involved this is all bull i i recognize this is bull i i admit this is bull if it was like a full moon when the child was conceived then it's definitely a boy is that do you know what that's really no not really let's tell you uh kate's uh story so she we went in for one i guess was the the first ultrasound where you can actually find out and they said do you want to know and we said yes and they said it's a girl and we're like great because we already have a boy so now i want each other great okay
John:
uh and then was that how actually you responded great okay now we have one of each all right so and then uh like we were in for like another ultrasound i guess later in the pregnancy whenever you like do like the routine second one or i don't know but anyway later we're in it was already we'd like oh you know picking out girls things and thinking of girls names and stuff like that we're going for one later and they're like
John:
oh it looks like it's a boy and like what wait what what how do you say it looks like a boy they told us it was a girl last time like no no it looks like a boy and then the person looks closer and like oh maybe yeah maybe you're right maybe that was just a thumb and so and they're like all right anyway everything's fine you're doing like like
John:
and so that you know let me know that it's not it's not an exact science first of all anyway she came out she was totally a girl it was fine but uh not just a little bit yeah it was not there was no no confusion but like there's a lot of stuff you've seen you know the ultrasounds it's a confusing picture and yeah it takes some skill and experience as a technician to interpret that as anything and you know a thumb or a toe ends up in the wrong position with the baby all twisted up people can get confused but
John:
both people on their initial proclamation sounded very very sure and the only reason the second person kind of hemmed and hawed after was because we said wait a second we've had like a month and a half of thinking this is gonna be a girl and now you're telling me boy uh yeah so you'll find out
Marco:
Or you'll have, in my situation, it's like, well, sometimes the baby is resting in such a way, in such a position, and you see something that makes it very, very clear, and it couldn't really be anything else.
Marco:
And the technician's like, well, we're not really supposed to tell you yet.
Marco:
But I'm like, but yeah, what's that?
Marco:
And they're like, well, you know.
Casey:
Yeah, so we asked the technician to put it in an envelope, seal it, and we are not the kind of people that want to do a gender reveal party.
Casey:
I understand that's very popular and fun and whatever, but it's not really for us.
Casey:
We just wanted to be able to change our minds in the future if we so desire.
Casey:
And so we have a sealed envelope with the gender in it.
Casey:
And both of us are very, very type A, very anal retentive.
Casey:
So I would say if you wanted to make a bet that it's likely that we will probably end up opening it.
Casey:
I'm waiting for somebody to like start an ATP pool to see what day it is we open it.
Casey:
But sitting here now, the hope is we will hold out until the baby is born and we'll see what happens.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
In any case, so yeah, I didn't mean to make that the entire pre-show, but yeah, that's a thing.
Casey:
So let's start with some follow-up.
Casey:
And as it turns out, the follow-up is the Marco show today.
Casey:
Wait, what?
Casey:
Yeah, you know, if you open the show notes.
Casey:
Yeah, if you open the show.
Casey:
So as I hear Marco saying, oh, I should probably open the document.
Casey:
By the magic of Google Docs, I see a new person open up the document.
Casey:
And it turns out it's Marco Arment.
Casey:
So, so yeah, so it turns out that iTunes, you collections are moving to Apple podcasts.
Casey:
And that got you on I don't want to call it a rant, but kind of a because that implies negativity, but kind of a you went on you got on your soapbox and talked about your thoughts for the future of iTunes.
Casey:
So can you kind of talk us through that?
Marco:
Yeah, basically there was this little news article last week that said that iTunes U, which is like the kind of educational course collection things on iTunes that have been around for quite a long time.
Marco:
Do you guys remember when those launched?
Marco:
It's not recently, right?
Casey:
Yeah, I don't think so.
Marco:
Yeah, so anyway, so iTunes U content, which is actually wonderful and quite extensive, that's been announced.
Marco:
That's moving into Apple Podcasts.
Marco:
So it will no longer be a separate section.
Marco:
It's always been like a section in iTunes.
Marco:
And now that is moving to Apple Podcasts.
Marco:
And I interpret this as, if it was just this by itself, well, that's kind of a weird thing.
Marco:
But when you combine it with things like the stopping selling all iPods that aren't iOS-based, and just some other little moves we've seen here and there, and just the timing in general, I think this is just one of many signs that they are preparing for the...
Marco:
abandonment or total deletion of iTunes.
Marco:
Probably abandonment.
Marco:
It's probably going to sit around forever in the utilities folder for the very few niche use cases that people need it for anymore.
Marco:
But I think iTunes is finally being relegated to the dustbin of history as it should have been a very long time ago.
Marco:
And they are, I bet,
Marco:
in the next version of mac os not you know not the one that's coming out like in a month but the one that's coming out probably next year i bet we're going to see finally a split up of itunes into brand new apps called things like music tv podcasts things like that do you remember the the screenshots for someone that dialogue box that's saying you know open document in movies or something like that do you remember that
John:
oh this just went through not long ago didn't it yeah someone someone had found some dialogue in some version of mac os some beta version of mac os that in response to trying to open a video instead of it opening an itunes or quicktime player it said do you want to open this in movies that's right yeah yeah and it makes me think
John:
If that's real.
John:
That's why I wish I could still find it, but I've lost track of it.
John:
Is this a case where the replacements for iTunes were kind of almost ready, but just didn't quite make the cut?
John:
Or is this the case where they're not going to be ready for a long time, but someone got ahead of the game and did the easy part, which is updating a dialogue box or something?
John:
What I'm always trying to gauge is, how close are we to the death of iTunes?
John:
It's one of those things that probably...
John:
People don't care enough about it for it to leak like iPhone parts.
John:
So we'll probably just kind of find out either when they accidentally post a beta that they're not supposed to or when someone announces it on stage.
John:
I mean, at this point, I kind of wonder...
John:
How many people will even care based on how many people still use iTunes?
John:
I mean, it'll probably be a big deal in the tech press just because tech press is full of old people who remember iTunes, right?
John:
But for everyone else, is it going to be a significant moment?
John:
And what I'm worried about is...
John:
All of the boringly named apps, music, what do I think it's going to be like?
John:
Music, movies.
John:
What else is it going to be?
John:
TV, probably.
John:
Podcasts, I would bet.
John:
Yeah, maybe.
John:
Anyway, if those apps have to travel the same road as the new Photos app did, I'll be kind of sad because Photos just started off very anemic and weird and janky and...
John:
It's a little bit better now and it's getting a little bit better still in high Sierra, but it was like a big regression for my thought in terms of functionality and just polish and everything.
John:
Like it was a super simplified, it basically looked like a UI kit application that was somehow ported to the Mac and everything was all stripped down and removed.
John:
And it wasn't like tiny and quick and lightning fast with that stripping down.
John:
It was like stripped down, but also still sluggish and annoying.
John:
And I don't want that.
John:
Like...
John:
iTunes, you know, we don't love iTunes, but the functionality that it has for like finding a song and playing it more or less works.
John:
And I can just imagine that exact same function of typing in something in a search box and having an arrow list down and having me like double click on a thing to hear it.
John:
adding the photos style lag to every one of those operations just a few extra milliseconds to make you feel better and remove as many controls as possible i kind of already removed a lot of controls but remove all the controls that you're used to so it's just like a big empty blank window where everything is a little bit slower than you want it to be with less functionality than it had before
John:
i'm hoping that's not the case i'm hoping these new slimmed down applications give us the benefits that we want from them being slimmed down not just the lack of confusion about like this is just an app for playing music and you don't have to worry about anything else but that the apps themselves are nicer and not they don't just look like hey we took the music app from ios and we put a mac title bar on top of it here you go because that will make me sad
Marco:
I think the reason I'm kind of looking forward to this happening, assuming that this is on the table, and I think it probably is.
Marco:
I mean, it does seem like this is the direction they're moving.
Marco:
But one of the reasons why I'm interested in this is just on a basic level,
Marco:
I just appreciate seeing significant effort into the Mac platform because it's so easy to look at how Apple has operated over the last few years and conclude that the Mac is really being neglected.
Marco:
And they've done a few things in the very recent past, like basically in the last year, they've done a few things that suggest that, no, the Mac isn't being neglected at least anymore.
Marco:
Maybe it was for a little bit, but now it isn't being neglected anymore, and here's some good stuff that's happening.
Marco:
So any sign of significant investment into the Mac platform, which breaking up iTunes and rewriting all these things as presumably new apps, that's a big undertaking.
Marco:
It's not like a big undertaking at the low-level OS level, but it is a big undertaking for basically the applications teams and the people responsible for all these media apps and their backends and everything else.
Marco:
That's a big undertaking.
Marco:
To take that on when technically you didn't have to, they could just keep iTunes going, even though it's terrible, and they could just say, well, it's not really worth ever fixing iTunes.
Marco:
That would be disappointing.
Marco:
That would show that they don't really care about the Mac anymore.
Marco:
But the fact that they seem like they're probably going in this direction, if they do this, that's a very good sign for the Mac platform in general.
Marco:
And then secondly, in regards to the actual apps,
Marco:
The answer will really be it depends.
Marco:
I mean, a lot of the roles of some of these apps like podcasts, there has never been a podcast app on the Mac from Apple.
Marco:
You know, iTunes can play podcasts, but that's, you know, it's pretty basic and it's really not very well designed for it.
Marco:
Similarly, iTunes can also play movies and TV shows.
Marco:
It pretty much sucks.
Marco:
Like, I've done it.
Marco:
It's not very pleasant to play these things in iTunes.
Marco:
Again, it works.
Marco:
You can do it.
Marco:
But it's not very good.
Marco:
And then the music part of iTunes is this weird, whatever the multi-headed thing is at the Hydra.
Marco:
Mm-hmm.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So it's like this weird... Thanks.
Marco:
Reference check.
Marco:
It's like this weird Hydra of like, you have like this entire local management thing, along with iTunes Match that matches your local music to the cloud and everything.
Marco:
And then you also have this Apple Music thing, which is really totally separate and works totally separate, but it tries to integrate into the same interface.
Marco:
And the combination of Apple Music into...
Marco:
iTunes with your local music library and things like that is a disaster in the UI.
Marco:
It's so clunky and confusing and opens people up to weird bugs and accidental data loss and things.
Marco:
It's really not great at all.
Marco:
So the idea of making a whole new music app, I think, raises the significant question of whether it would be Apple Music only.
Marco:
And I think I would prefer if it was.
Marco:
Because to me, if they could remove Apple Music from iTunes and just let iTunes be the legacy app that does your local music library and has nothing to do with Apple Music, then the Apple Music app could finally have its own coherent design that would be way less confusing, way more lightweight, would solve people's issues with storage and cloud matching and everything by basically just not supporting any of that stuff.
Marco:
that would be so much better so i hope that's the direction they're going i don't know if it will be i would give it maybe 50 50 odds if they do this but are you saying that you wouldn't be able to have a local music collection the music app would itunes stay around forever i don't know there are lots of ancient os 10 or sorry mac os apps uh that do basically stay around forever you know many of them are better in the utilities folder but you know they're all still there
Marco:
So, you know, if you wanted iTunes to be your local music player, fine, it can keep your local music player.
Marco:
Also, it isn't the only one that exists in the world.
Marco:
There are other local music players for macOS.
Marco:
And if Apple went in this direction with the official music app, and also iTunes basically died eventually over time or immediately, then there would be an immediate large market for other people to make these apps.
Marco:
So I wouldn't worry too much about that.
Marco:
Even though, like, I am a person who uses iTunes almost entirely for local music.
Marco:
And that's not going to change anytime soon.
Marco:
But I recognize also that is like a dying breed.
Marco:
And if Apple Music is able to be its own app and basically kick it out of iTunes, that's way better for both Apple Music and local music libraries.
John:
i don't like that idea i want the i think just an app just dedicated to music like the solution i think is not to say oh it's confusing because you have itunes match and local files plus cloud files and it's all confusing in itunes the solution is not to not let people do local it's to make a dedicated music app that you know makes it not confusing like so is is better about uh
John:
All the things that we complain about iTunes about about not respecting your files on disk about improperly matching them about not respecting your metadata like it has to has to serve the needs of the entire range of music you could have you could have music that you from your own CDs or illegally downloaded or whatever.
John:
that you've carefully tagged and organized over many many years you could have a subscription to apple music uh and all these are things that could be there and it has to it has to respect them it has to you know it has to treat them uh not treat them cavalierly and do a good job backing things up and be reliable and all the things that you get a chance to do when you start from scratch with a new application rather than saying oh this is just going to be an apple music streaming player and
John:
will let you know a third-party opportunity to do music because i don't think there's enough of a market for there to be you know because i just don't think that many people have local music collections that they care that much about for there to be a robust third-party music player especially if that third-party music player doesn't support streaming services who's going to make that application and say we're just going to sell to the diminishing proportion of the user base who
John:
uh, have local, uh, music that they care about.
John:
Like that's not a winning, even without iTunes in the picture at all.
John:
Like that's not a winning formula.
John:
So I really hope they don't do that.
John:
I hope, I hope they,
John:
Have a music app that does everything that needs to do.
Casey:
You know, I think you underestimate how much both Marco and Stephen Hackett would pay for this sort of manager standalone music app.
Casey:
But be that as it may, it's funny because I feel like my heart agrees with Marco.
Casey:
And if I were calling the shots, I would want...
Casey:
There to be two different apps like let iTunes stick around forever, but slim it down to be just managing your local music library and or iTunes match.
Casey:
And, you know, obviously there's some nuances there.
Casey:
Well, it's simple for the purposes of simplicity.
Casey:
Let's call it that.
Casey:
And then have, like Marco said, a brand new Apple Music app that's just for Apple Music.
Casey:
And.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And having Apple Music versus iTunes would satisfy that.
Casey:
But my brain, even though my heart agrees with Marco, my brain agrees with John, and I think that the rightest answer to the solution is probably just making iTunes or whatever replaces it not crappy and have it more eloquently handle remote music versus local music, etc.
Casey:
And the other thing I'm really wary of is even though I...
Casey:
I really would love to see iTunes either die or get revamped such that it's not all things to all people.
Casey:
I really worry, and John, you were saying this earlier, I really worry that we're in one of those photo scenarios when all of us was calling for, you know, oh, let's replace photos.
Casey:
Photos is so old.
Casey:
Nobody's paying attention to it.
Casey:
Let's fix it.
Casey:
And then we got the fix and we were all like, oh, this is not what we wanted at all.
John:
Replace iPhotos, you mean, not photos.
Casey:
Sorry.
Casey:
Yes, yes, yes.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Replace iPhoto.
Casey:
And obviously it's gotten a lot better, but it still was not really what we wanted.
Casey:
And look at, what was it, Final Cut X?
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
Something like that?
Casey:
I don't want to do any video stuff.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Sorry.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
I'm sorry, everybody.
John:
Who does that?
John:
Gray does that, doesn't he?
John:
I can't tell if he's doing it on purpose.
Casey:
I mean, I mean, I mean, I totally did that on purpose.
Casey:
Totally did that on purpose.
Casey:
Anyway, I'm so sorry to everyone.
Casey:
But the point is, when Final Cut Pro got redone and everyone, you know, was really perturbed about the things that were dropped, I'm not saying unfairly, but was perturbed about the things that were dropped, the features that were dropped.
Casey:
I fear that we're in a similar situation with iTunes, and I don't see any way how we couldn't be, given that iTunes is all things to all people, and there's so much code there.
Casey:
Wasn't it Joel on Software, Joel Spolsky, that wrote a really good post years and years and years ago about how you should never rewrite anything?
John:
Yeah, we discussed it on this show, and I said it wasn't that good.
Marco:
Like many things, that is a great rule.
Marco:
It's a great input when you're making a decision, but like all rules, you have to decide when you know how to break them or not.
Marco:
If you say, between this release of our product and next release of our product, we should rewrite the whole thing from scratch.
Marco:
Is the product still needing to do the same things?
Marco:
What are you really getting out of that?
Marco:
Whereas with this, the needs of these products have changed so much over time.
Marco:
that keeping them around is actually more of a liability in a lot of ways.
Marco:
And not only from the code, but even from the design of having this all be one app.
Marco:
We're not suggesting that you rewrite iTunes from scratch.
Marco:
We're suggesting that you break up this app into five different other apps, each of which can be way better at solving the problem that it's meant to solve than this one app that tries to solve all five of these things badly.
John:
So here's my meta concern about this whole thing, and I was trying to think of this while you guys were talking, and I can't come up with something.
John:
Maybe you can.
John:
My question is, does Apple still know how to make really great Mac apps?
John:
I'm trying to think of the last really great Mac app that Apple made.
John:
Is it maybe Final Cut Pro X and iMovie, like when they revamped those?
John:
Because those are pretty good, right?
John:
But I'm not sure...
John:
It used to be Apple makes the best Mac apps, and if you're a third-party developer, try to make your apps as good as them.
John:
And it slowly shifted to be like, if you want to see the exemplars of great Mac applications, you have to look at third parties because all the first-party stuff is either
John:
not half-butted in marco's parlance but like it's slight like for example when they redid contacts and notes on the mac i mean you know they're all right they're not bad but they're pretty slight right no one would say this is a tour de force mac application of the mac version of notes like it's all right you know it's there um and now all the great mac apps it's like if you want to see an amazing mac application uh like you know look at look at panics you know transmit right
John:
or uh something from omni right where it's like a a full featured beautifully designed well thought out stable reliable you know like all all the things that you want from a great mac application the kind of applications or bb edit for that matter the kind of applications that make people love them and be dedicated to them no one is no one is dedicated to the mac version of notes right
John:
I mean, the iOS version of Notes has gotten way better, and they're adding features left and right there, but I'm trying to think of what's the last great Mac.
John:
I suppose Safari.
John:
Safari's pretty darn good, too, but that's old.
John:
Like, the last great new Mac app Apple has had.
John:
In the past few years, it seems like every time they make a new Mac application, it's all right.
Marco:
Yeah, I feel like Photos is the best example.
Marco:
Photos is the app that should have been a great demonstration of what the Mac can do.
Marco:
And it hasn't been at all.
Marco:
And I would even broaden your question of, can Apple still make great Mac apps?
Marco:
I would remove the word Mac from that and say, can Apple still make great apps?
Marco:
Apple is remarkably good these days at being a platform company.
Marco:
Their OS is amazing.
Marco:
Their APIs are amazing.
Marco:
They keep adding new cool APIs like ARKit just to add to their other massive pile of incredibly sophisticated APIs.
Marco:
Apple is really good at the platforms, the frameworks, the OS.
Marco:
But I really have not gotten the sense from Apple that they really know how to make great apps anymore.
Marco:
And to their credit, they haven't made very many new apps recently.
Marco:
Maybe they realize this too.
Marco:
Or maybe they've decided not to do that much anymore.
John:
They've been making good apps, I feel like, especially on iOS.
John:
I think they're making good iOS apps.
John:
And I think a lot of the iOS ones are exemplars.
John:
You could say, hey, you want to make a good iOS app?
John:
Look at Apple's applications.
John:
And that's kind of like the baseline.
John:
Try to match that.
John:
Right.
John:
But none of them, I mean, I don't know on iOS, but like on the Mac anyway, I don't feel like any of them are great.
John:
And it kind of in the way that iTunes was great in the beginning, like, you know, when iTunes sort of got the ball rolling and it was like you could search for your music so quickly and the interface was so straightforward and intuitive that anyone could figure out how to do it with a three pane browser and, you know, and then integrating the store that all seemed to work like before iTunes became the jack of all trades.
John:
I think iTunes was a pretty great application, too, even though it was just Sound Jam or whatever reskin to begin with.
John:
Right.
Casey:
Yeah, something like that.
Marco:
I'm sure there is still the talent in the company to make great applications, like what we're talking about, if they prioritize them.
Marco:
I think they just haven't prioritized them, really.
Marco:
They've been doing so much else.
Marco:
They've been launching new platforms.
Marco:
and making new services and, you know, making the OSs better and everything.
Marco:
They've been doing so much else that it just seems like they don't really put a lot behind their first-party apps anymore.
Marco:
And that shows in some big, you know, end-of-life things like Aperture and also just the kind of
Marco:
languishing nature of a lot of their other apps, along with apps that are revamped into new versions that aren't necessarily as good as the old ones, like the Photos app, when that replaced iPhoto and Aperture.
Marco:
I think it's just very clear.
Marco:
I would say, I don't want to put this entirely on Johnny Ive, because I do that a lot, but in the big shuffle-up when Forstall was out and Ive's department became head of software design as well as hardware design, I would say since that happened,
Marco:
Apple has seemed to be in a period of flux with their application design skills that have not been good.
Marco:
And even going into iOS 11, we still don't know what the new phone and this potential notch is going to look like.
Marco:
But if that notch... Basically, we're looking at the iOS 11 design with these giant title bars with the big, white, bold text titles and basically making everything look like Apple Music, which seems like a terrible idea because if you would have said after last year... If you would have said after iOS 10...
Marco:
We're going to make all the apps in the system look like Apple Music.
Marco:
People would have thought you were joking.
Marco:
But now that's the style.
Marco:
That might make sense in some big grand vision here that we have yet to see the final play of when the new phone comes out.
Marco:
It's also possible that Apple is just going through this kind of design puberty period where they're in between two different eras or ages or they're trying to find their footing or whatever the case may be.
Marco:
It seems like Apple has been all over the map with software design in the last few years and they have not yet found the right place to be yet.
John:
Yeah, I feel like Final Cut Pro X and the new iMovie that was before it
John:
Those were actually, I think, the only Mac applications that could really be called great.
John:
They were after the...
John:
you know the skeuomorphic age like a garage band and stuff like that with the wood paneling like that was you know an iMovie and the original digital hub like there's a lot of great applications there but those were all definitely in the forestall skeuomorphic whatever even though he you know whatever that that era right and then where we are now is the place where you know photos and
John:
the the revised uh you know contacts and and uh notes and even calendar and stuff on the mac they're kind of you know they're all right they're very simple they're slightly more of the johnny ive thing and i feel like in between there was the imovie design which was not super skeuomorphic but was also not like oh let's remove every single control from the interface and make just giant expanses of white white or in this case black
John:
um so i think maybe that is and that's the last time i can recall seeing one of those maybe there's other applications that i don't use them people keep bringing up like the iWork suite and everything but those aren't those aren't new applications like they've evolved and i could say those had the same kind of problem with the syncing up with the ui kit and i say sorry not the ui kit syncing up with ios features and losing stuff and coming back up they've
John:
They've had their own problems during their development.
John:
I don't think those are great applications yet.
John:
And even if they were, you'd have to date them back to when they were introduced.
John:
So maybe it's just iMovie and Final Cut Pro X. And those were controversial as well.
Marco:
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Casey:
We have what is possibly my favorite line item that has ever appeared in follow-up ever.
Casey:
And I will read it verbatim for the listeners.
Casey:
The topic that we are apparently about to discuss is... It's not a topic, it's a follow-up item.
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
Good grief.
Casey:
The follow-up item, copyright 2011, John C. Hughes said that we are about to discuss is as follows, quote, advice for Marco's sensitive tushy, end quote.
Casey:
Would one of us, I'm assuming John, like to tell us what his advice would be for Marco's sensitive tush?
John:
It's not my advice.
John:
It's listeners' advice.
John:
Last week we talked about Marco's sensitive tushy and how his bicycle seat hurt his bum.
John:
And people had advice for what he could do to make his bum feel better.
John:
One piece of advice was to buy shorts with a pad in the butt, especially made for people who ride bikes, made for mountain bikers.
John:
um so apparently that's a thing that you can get and someone suggested that but the other suggestion that i think that is even better is bicycle riders saying don't put all your weight on your butt when you're riding your bike put some of your weight on the pedals and some of your weight in the handlebars and some of the weight on your butt and then you won't have your entire weight on the very hard seat and if you do that it will make any seat feel more comfortable for you
Marco:
I would say the latter option of changing my biking technique to put less weight on my butt, that is a good idea if I was a professional bike-ist.
Marco:
But I'm not.
John:
You don't have to be a professional bike-ist, in your words, to do that.
John:
You can change the way you bike and not be paid to be a bicycle rider.
Marco:
you know that's something i will slowly work towards but that's like you know a gradual technique thing also like a lot of the riding i'm doing around here is very slowly because i'm riding with my kid who is now very well riding a bike that took no time thank you john you were right um and it's awesome so we're riding around but it's riding around very slowly so like it's kind of hard to like hold yourself up all that time and you're going like two miles an hour
Marco:
Secondly, the bike shorts with built-in butt padding, I don't really see the point of that, honestly.
Marco:
I mean, again, maybe this is something that professional bikists have some good reason for, but if they're saying the seats shouldn't be padded, your shorts should be padded.
John:
Well, I think they're both padded, like you're doubling up the padding.
John:
I guess.
John:
Then you get to look like stupid sexy Flanders.
Marco:
I appreciate these two options written in by the professional bikists.
Marco:
I am not going to take either of them.
Marco:
Instead, I did what I said I was going to do last week, and I just went on Amazon and spent $18 on a really soft, cushy seat.
Marco:
And that's great, and it fixed it pretty much as well as anything besides new tires could.
Marco:
So, done.
John:
oh stupid sexy flanders for skiing not biking there wasn't there a simpsons episode where flanders had bike shorts too anyway bike shorts you can kind of be an homage to stupid sexy flanders is this the first time i've ever had a podcast topic about my butt i think it might be not the last probably not uh and just to to do a quick status check how many bikes did you buy in the last week
Marco:
Well, how do I measure?
John:
How many bikes did you return?
John:
What is the net bike flow?
Casey:
I was asking to be funny, and now you're giving me a legitimate friggin' answer.
Marco:
Technically two, but one was a replacement for a defect in one.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
Yeah, the other one was the sand bike.
Marco:
It's amazing.
John:
i thought you weren't getting one i thought you borrowed the neighbors and you were like oh that's this saved me a lot of uh money now i'm not gonna buy the thing because i know that it's hard work yep and then i bought it it's a lot of fun it's a lot of fun how do we do this john john how do we how do we do it you get a sandbike for adam he's got unlimited energy he could just be whirring away on those pedestals pedals forever he's he's riding nine miles a day just get him a sandbike he'll be down to like you know four and a half the same amount of effort
Marco:
It's actually a lot easier to follow him in a sandbike because it's like you can go.
Marco:
First of all, you can go slowly more easily because the tires are so big.
Marco:
It has five inch tires.
Marco:
And then the other thing is that when when he you know, as you're going down, you know, some of the boring parts of the ride, if you're on the sandbike, you can go in like the sand berm on the side of the sidewalk and have more fun and jump over the various things there.
Marco:
And, you know, it makes a little more fun.
Marco:
The regular bike with the firm ride is the way more practical one.
Marco:
That is the one I should have and the one I still ride a lot of the time.
Marco:
The sand bike is the fun one.
Marco:
That's the one that makes me smile.
Casey:
I can't believe you had a serious answer to that question.
Casey:
I should have known better.
Casey:
I should have known.
John:
Just wait until he starts using the sand bike in the snow.
John:
Bring it back home for the winter.
John:
I actually was thinking about trying that.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
Well, I have it now.
John:
Attach jet engines to the side and put skis into the wheels.
John:
I need a drink.
Casey:
Okay, let's just move on to Ask ATP.
Casey:
I don't have very many thoughts on this other than to say the only OLED screen that I'm aware of that I have is my Apple Watch, because that's OLED, right?
Casey:
And, um, and, and I haven't noticed any of these issues personally.
Casey:
That doesn't mean he's wrong by any means.
Casey:
I just, it just means I haven't noticed them.
John:
So Android's been, a lot of Android's always been OLED for a long time.
John:
And we were like, why, why is Apple still have LCD?
John:
The,
John:
One of the theories is that Apple's standards for color reproduction and, like, just general image quality have not been able to be met by OLED screens.
John:
So, you know, practically speaking, like...
John:
if you OLED or LCD future for iPhone well the new iPhones coming out are going to be OLED certainly the pro one maybe the other ones as well right so there's that practical thing of like hey the next new iPhones you're going to get some OLEDs on long term does that mean like all phones are going to be OLED going forward if Apple puts an OLED in their fancy new phone it probably means they were able to get the quality up to their standard so it's as good as and certainly better in black levels than the LCDs ones to replace them so
John:
Apple has waited a long time to jump from LCD to OLED, but they're doing it now, which probably means they're going to be good.
John:
And if they are good, the potential power saving advantages of them mean that there's no reason for them to go back to LCD and, you know, and the black level improvements on them.
John:
So I think that the future of the iPhone line is all OLED as soon as Apple can swing that in terms of cost.
John:
Maybe right now their fancy OLED screen and the volumes they can get produced in mean that they'll have to keep shipping LCD iPhones for a long time.
John:
And certainly the step-down models will look going to be LCD for their lives until they get replaced by step-down OLED models.
John:
For burn-in, image retention, whatever, LCD still has that.
John:
OLED is supposedly worse.
John:
We'll find out how much worse.
John:
But we've seen LCDs with really bad image retention and LCDs with not so bad image retention.
John:
Presumably the same is true of OLEDs.
John:
We'll find out.
John:
And white being never white or pinkish, that goes back to quality.
John:
Like presumably the one of the screens that Apple's got don't suffer from that problem.
John:
So short answer, OLED.
Casey:
Josh Steger writes, what is Marco's process for reselling his myriad of machines?
Casey:
Would this work for someone without 100,000 Twitter followers?
Marco:
So basically my process is when I want to sell something, whether it's a laptop or something else, when I want to sell something that I think anybody on Twitter might want, it moves fast.
Marco:
The reason it moves fast, yes, part of it is that I have a lot of followers, so I kind of have an unfair advantage there.
Marco:
Part of it is that I know how much it costs me to sell something on eBay.
Marco:
If you sell something on eBay, you're going to lose roughly 15% in various fees and everything.
Marco:
So eBay is great if you search completed items and more specifically sold items.
Marco:
It's great to tell you kind of what something is worth.
Marco:
And I know that if I sell it on eBay, I'm only going to net 15% or 20% under that price.
Marco:
So then I just post it on Twitter saying, hey, I'll sell this for 20% under eBay's price or whatever.
Marco:
And it moves fast because it's both being shown to a lot of people and it's also a really good deal.
Marco:
I value simplicity and speed of the deal over getting the absolute maximum price for it.
Marco:
So if you want to sell things...
Marco:
uh you have two tools at your disposal you can either you know go go for a big audience or um you know which you know if you if you don't have a lot of twitter followers or followers elsewhere you know ebay is your best chance there or you can just sell it for a very very attractive price if you just want to move fast and i choose to do both of those things so i don't think it's really the follower count that is as big a deal i mean certainly that helps but um
John:
And obviously you need to be above some threshold to have any idea of selling.
John:
But the key factor for why once you get above a certain number of followers, why Marco in particular has success selling things in addition to the pricing that you just talked about is that.
John:
Lots of people feel like they know Marco from all the things that he does in public.
John:
And so there's a certain level of trust that is implicit.
John:
Trust that he's not just some random scammer.
John:
And not just trust like, oh, he seems nice on podcasts, so I think he's a nice person.
John:
It's sort of a mutually assured destruction thing.
John:
If you are a quote-unquote public figure, right, if you have a public reputation and something to lose...
John:
Chances are good that you're not going to be like, you know, an Internet famous nerd person with 100,000 followers and then scam someone by taking their money and never shipping the machine to them.
John:
Right.
John:
But you wouldn't do that because that person is going to be like, hey, they'll write a blog post.
John:
It'll be like, I tried to buy Mark Armand's computer and he took my money and never sent me the computer.
John:
And that would get a bazillion hits and it would be all over the internet.
John:
Like Marco has something to lose, his reputation.
John:
And people would care about that story.
John:
People would listen to that person's story.
John:
It was like, oh, famous person doesn't mean thing.
John:
Whereas random scammer takes your money and doesn't send you the thing on eBay and you write a blog post about it.
John:
No one's going to post that on Hacker News.
John:
No one's going to, you know, it's not going to be on TechCrunch front page.
John:
It's not going to be in TechMeme.
John:
No one cares.
John:
It'd be like, oh, so you got scanned by someone on the internet.
John:
That's great, right?
John:
So I think the combination of people understanding that Marco has something to lose and people generally feeling like they know him from all of his podcasts and his work say that...
John:
He's probably really got this computer.
John:
He's not lying about it.
John:
He's going to ship it to me like he says he's going to.
John:
And that peace of mind does not exist on eBay, whether buying or selling or Craigslist or anything like that.
John:
It's like, I don't know these people.
John:
This could not be a person at all.
John:
This could be a bot somewhere in Lithuania.
John:
I have no idea about any of this.
John:
It's not like buying it from a friend because they don't know Marco or know him, but the combination of mutually shared destruction public figure thing and the general nice feelings people have for people that they read their blog posts and listen to their podcasts, that is super important on top of the large number of followers.
John:
Now, does that mean all this advice is completely useless for everybody?
John:
I think Marco's advice is the most useful, like price it to move and it'll move, but you still have to find some venue for putting your offer in front of people, and then you have to...
John:
Marco's got this on his side.
John:
You have to deal with the person who makes the offer.
John:
You write the thing on Twitter.
John:
Hopefully you're narrowing it down to people who follow you on Twitter and know to find your stuff there as it's not just a bunch of random individuals, but you still have to deal with that person and hope that they, you know, you get the money from them and you're going to send them the thing and all that stuff like that.
John:
So,
John:
I don't think there's any easy answers here.
John:
Uh, but if you can, if you can at all, get yourself a hundred thousand Twitter followers and have a public reputation on the internet for a decade or two, that really helps with selling stuff.
Casey:
I'd also like to add that if you're willing to trade a little bit of lost money, so to speak, for convenience, Gazelle, who I honestly don't remember if they were a past sponsor of the show.
Casey:
They probably were, but I've used them by choice.
Casey:
And there are other equivalent people as well.
Casey:
But Gazelle is super nice for technology-related things, so like old computers, old phones, etc.,
Casey:
And basically, you just tell them, hey, I've got some such device.
Casey:
It's of approximately this quantity quality.
Casey:
And they mail you a box, you put your device in the box, you mail it to them and they will give you I think it used to be I don't know if it's still true, like an Amazon gift card or a I think like a check or something like that.
Casey:
And typically these prices are not as good as they would be if you did like an eBay or something like that, but they're not terrible.
Casey:
And if you're willing to trade a little bit of money for supreme convenience, and you don't have 100,000 Twitter followers, I definitely recommend looking into one of these places like Gazelle.
Casey:
I've heard very good things about some sort of quasi-equivalent thing, or maybe it's more like eBay than Amazon does.
Casey:
I don't know anything about it really, but I've heard good things.
Casey:
But there are ways you can do this is what I'm driving at.
Casey:
There are ways you can do this without having 100,000 Twitter followers.
Marco:
I would also say if what you are selling is an Apple product, if you're going to go that route, check out Mac Me and Offer.
Marco:
This is something I learned from Paul Haddad of TweetBot.
Marco:
I got a great deal on one of my MacBook Pros that I sold last year by just selling it to them instead.
Marco:
There's a bunch of these sites that buy this stuff.
Marco:
Most of the time, the deals that you get are awful.
Marco:
A big site like Gazelle, the prices you get are hideously bad.
Marco:
You only sell to them if you really, really don't want to go to eBay or something like that.
Marco:
Sometimes it doesn't work out.
Marco:
One of the things I've found is when you're selling something that is not that old,
Marco:
But not that popular or not selling very well.
Marco:
So, for instance, when I sold my 15-inch Touch Bar last year or when I sold the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, those were things that, because I guess they weren't selling that well, Apple was discounting them pretty deeply in both their refurb store and through...
Marco:
partners like Best Buy and Target that are Apple's official retailers, but that things go on sale there mysteriously when Apple needs to move more of them, even when Apple themselves never puts anything on sale.
Marco:
So if the thing you're selling is one of those things, you might be stuck with something that's not worth nearly what you paid for it or what you think it should be worth.
Marco:
But if you go to one of these sites, you can usually get a bunch of offers and pick whatever one is easiest for you.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
The final ask ATP for this week.
Casey:
T. Delm writes, have any of you ever seen a doctor or physical therapist because of RSI?
Casey:
I will start because I have a boring answer, which is no, I haven't.
Casey:
Every great once in a while, one of my wrists will hurt ever so slightly and I'll adjust my positioning or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
And I've been lucky enough that it tends to go away very quickly.
Casey:
This is where the entire Internet writes in to say, oh, you've already got it.
Casey:
It's too late.
Casey:
That's probably true, and that's okay.
Casey:
I will try to do this in order of severity of RSI problems, so I will move on now to Marco.
Marco:
I don't think I've ever seen a doctor for RSI.
Marco:
I did have a major back issue that put me into physical therapy for a little while, about 10 years ago.
Marco:
I asked a few RSI-related questions during that little process, but I made a few changes that happened to be similar because it was about sitting too much and stuff.
Marco:
But otherwise, the answer is generally no.
Marco:
I've only had very minor RSI problems, and I have solved them mostly by reading a few books and articles and making changes to make sure my desk is the right height, make sure I have an appropriate chair, and I switched to a natural keyboard with a split layout.
Marco:
And those things were basically enough for me to solve my minor issues so far.
Casey:
All right, John, I'm buckled in.
Casey:
Let's hear the story.
John:
So I have gone to a doctor.
John:
My first really bad flare-up was back when I lived in Georgia, shortly after graduating college.
John:
And I went to a general practitioner and got referred, and nothing really came of that.
John:
Everything they recommended was not useful.
John:
I eventually moved back up to Massachusetts, and same deal.
John:
Went to a general practitioner, got referred.
John:
Eventually...
John:
Found a physical therapist who actually helped me and kept going to see that person for a while and did a bunch of adjustments and life changes and stuff like that.
John:
And now I'm basically managing it.
John:
The difficulty with this is it's basically it's hard to find.
John:
doctors or specialists or gps who understand rsi like at all right a lot of a lot of doctors have a vague surface level understanding that's basically at the same level of the average person where i think rsi is synonymous with carpal tunnel and don't really know about any of the details and give you dumb advice or tell you to take advil all which is useless um
John:
if you do find someone who actually understands rsi and treats rsi and you know takes it seriously and
John:
actually knows what will help people because they have lots of patients that do this.
John:
Uh, that's, that's great, but it takes a lot of tries to get there.
John:
Um, you don't, I don't think anyone ever needs their, their general practitioner to do anything for them.
John:
Mostly you need to find some kind of specialist, whether it's a specialist doctor or occupational therapist or physical therapist or whatever it may be.
John:
Um, um,
John:
i you know i always tell people that they if you know i would tell casey you know see a doctor but it's it's like it's good advice because it's something they should do but it's bad advice because i know if i tell them that and they go see their doctor their doctor is almost certainly not going to help them at all but you have to keep going and like finding you have to like you know use the internet find other people in your area who have rsi and that's
John:
I think everyone has learned now in this age where everybody sits in front of something and types for long periods of time that, you know, if you're certainly in our tech nerd programming circles, right?
John:
But I think just in general.
John:
the number of people that we all know that have RSI is way bigger than people think.
John:
Some people just don't talk about it, but just think about it.
John:
Who, who do we know that has had RSI?
John:
You both know me.
John:
Marco's had it a little bit.
John:
Uh, we know Mike Hurley.
John:
Uh, we just go through all the relay family.
John:
Gray has RSI problems.
John:
Like there's a lot of people have it.
John:
And so there, there is a market for helping these people.
John:
So, uh,
John:
You should be able to find... It'll be difficult.
John:
I admit it will be difficult.
John:
It will not be easy.
John:
But you should be able to find someone who can help you in your area.
John:
And what will help you?
John:
What kind of doctor will help you?
John:
What kind of treatment will help you?
John:
I don't know.
John:
But you should... The worst thing you can do is ignore it.
John:
So you have to go through that annoying, terrible U.S.
John:
healthcare system rigmarole of...
John:
doing whatever you have to do to get whatever referrals you need to have and if referrals crappy go back to your gp if you still need a referral and say i would like you to refer me to this person or sometimes you just can't you know this person is out of network and you have to pay out of pocket you have to do what you have to do but ignoring it is the worst thing you do so short answer to that question yes some of us have seen a doctor physical therapist
Casey:
Oh, my word.
John:
We should answer the next yes or no question we get.
John:
We should just ask each of us to give a yes or no answer.
Casey:
Yeah, okay.
Casey:
I'm not sure I'm capable of that.
Casey:
And with respect, I am positive that you two are not.
John:
I could totally do it.
Casey:
No, you're wrong, sir.
Ooh.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Aftershocks bone conduction headphones.
Marco:
Go to atp.aftershocks.com to learn more.
Marco:
Aftershocks headphones work by bone conduction.
Marco:
Small transducers rest in front of your ears, not inside or around or on top of them like most headphones, and they send vibrations through your cheekbones directly to your inner ear, which bypasses your ears and eardrums.
Marco:
So unlike every other kind of headphone,
Marco:
Bone conduction leaves your ears completely open with nothing in or on top of them.
Marco:
This brings some major benefits.
Marco:
So, first of all, it's great for comfort if, like me, earbuds actually hurt your ears.
Marco:
And they're also, as I'm finding this summer, great for exercise and hot weather.
Marco:
Because they don't cover your ears, so they are far less sweaty than regular headphones.
Marco:
And if I do sweat a little or if I get caught in the rain outside, no problem.
Marco:
They are IP55 certified for water resistance.
Marco:
And for me, the biggest thing about aftershocks, the big reason that determines whether they are right for you, is that because nothing is blocking your ears.
Marco:
You hear all of the sound from the world around you.
Marco:
So this can be a bad thing if you're in a place like a very loud subway station.
Marco:
But this can be a very good thing if you think about it in different situations, such as if you are taking a phone call while doing things around the house, or you need to listen for your kids while you also listen to a podcast.
Marco:
Or if you're, like I do here, walking or cycling or running, when it's really important for safety and practicality for you to hear the world around you, but you might want to listen to, you know, an audiobook or a talk show while you're doing that.
Marco:
Aftershocks work great if you need to generally hear the outside world while you want to listen to a podcast or take a phone call.
Marco:
If I'm honest, you know, sound quality for music is not great.
Marco:
You want these things for spoken word content.
Marco:
When you're in an environment where you want to hear what's going on around you.
Marco:
That's the best.
Marco:
And Aftershocks are so good for that.
Marco:
Here I am.
Marco:
I'm on vacation for about a month.
Marco:
I have only brought with me the Aftershocks headphones for all of my portable use.
Marco:
Every day I've been walking my dog and taking bike rides for like two hours using Aftershocks.
Marco:
And they are the best for this purpose.
Marco:
I'm so happy with them.
Marco:
The model I'm using, it's a flagship model called the Trex Titanium.
Marco:
I cannot recommend this enough for outdoor activities, doing stuff around the house, anywhere where it's not too loud around you and you want to hear what's going on around you while listening to talk content.
Marco:
They are perfect for that.
Marco:
Battery life is great.
Marco:
They're water resistant.
Marco:
Check it out.
Marco:
The Aftershocks Trex Titanium retails for $130, but through our link, atp.aftershocks.com, you can get a pair for just $100.
Marco:
atp.aftershocks.com.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Aftershocks for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
I got two pieces of bad news this week.
Casey:
I'm going to start with the easy one because that's not a topic, but it's just sad.
Casey:
And if people have workarounds, I want to hear it.
Casey:
Apparently, there's a new version of the Google Photos uploader.
Casey:
And in that new version, I'm being told by a friend of mine, it does not recognize network or perhaps there's just no place to add a network share.
Casey:
I have not yet updated, and now I fear it, but there will probably come a time that I will need to update, and I don't know what I'm going to do because I currently have it pointed at a folder on my Synology that has all of our pictures because now that we have a child, there is an insurmountable, just indescribable amount of photos, and I need the disk space on the Synology to hold them.
Casey:
That was bad news number one.
Marco:
Bad news number two... The M5 only comes in automatic now?
Casey:
oh that's right i didn't tell both of you this like four weeks ago i didn't want to believe you i didn't either it was not a rumor it was like it's the real news anyway go ahead uh well so that was that was bad news number two and not only that but i i would like to publicly concede to marco that i believe you and i had an argument i don't remember if it was public or not i don't remember if this was neutral time or not
Casey:
But you were adamant that the next M5 would have all wheel drive.
Casey:
And I don't think I was adamantly opposed, but I was definitely very opposed.
Casey:
And you were correct, sir, that the next M5.
John:
I can't believe you're conceding this now, because I also believe on this very show, like a year ago, I said, hey, guess what?
John:
Marco was right.
John:
It's coming in all wheel drive.
John:
Like, and again, I wasn't relating to you a rumor.
John:
I was telling you a fact, but apparently only now that it is announced to the public, you're like, oh, wow, it's real.
John:
I was holding out hope.
John:
No, like when I told you it was like, this was a done deal.
John:
Done.
John:
Anyway, you guys don't listen to me.
Casey:
Well, why would we?
Casey:
What do you know about anything?
Casey:
Anyway, the actual piece of bad news that I'm meandering toward that I that I really wanted to talk about now is that my backup provider.
Casey:
I don't know if I would even say of choice.
Casey:
I feel like this was kind of a I have no other options that I cared for.
Casey:
So this was the only option I had, which was CrashPlan, has decided to sunset their consumer business.
Casey:
So the reason I chose CrashPlan is because you can have it back up a network drive, and it's considered to be part of your computer.
Casey:
And thus, I honestly don't remember what I was paying CrashPlan a year, but it was somewhere between $5 and $10 a month.
Casey:
And you could have it back up for, in my case, for example, the Synology, and it is just part of my $10 a month or whatever the number may have been.
Casey:
And perhaps in part because of people like me, they've decided, okay, we're not going to do the consumer side anymore.
Casey:
We're only going to do small business and enterprise.
Casey:
And it's not going away for, I think, over a year.
Casey:
And so I have plenty of time to figure out the answer.
Casey:
But I've already been wanting to move away from CrashPlan because they have the world's worst native app, which isn't really that terribly native.
Casey:
It's a godawful Java app.
Casey:
Is godawful and Java redundant?
Casey:
I think it is.
Casey:
But anyway.
John:
I thought they had a real native app.
Marco:
No.
No.
Marco:
I believe they promised native apps basically every three months for the last two years and never actually delivered them.
John:
No, I think they have one, but it might only be for the business customers and not for the consumer ones.
Casey:
That's exactly it.
Casey:
So the thing I've been told, and again, I don't know if this is true or not, is that it is only for the business side.
Casey:
So one of the options that I have as a crash plan user is I could change to a business plan and
Casey:
And I didn't think I wanted to do that on account of the fact that I didn't want their god awful Java based client app.
Casey:
But as we just established, perhaps the business app or the business side wouldn't be so bad.
Casey:
But I haven't had an overwhelmingly positive experience with CrashPlan.
Casey:
It just hasn't been negative enough for me to do anything about it.
Casey:
So at this point, I'm starting to explore, okay, what are my other options?
Casey:
And not only because they've sponsored the show, and so they've given us some money in the past, and I'm kind of endeared to them for that, but because everyone I know genuinely has said that Backblaze is phenomenal, I've been looking at Backblaze.
Casey:
But the problem with Backblaze is you can't do a network share directly.
Casey:
And have that as part of a regular home Backblaze plan, which is, if I'm not mistaken, why Marco is running iSCSI or was at the very least running iSCSI on Synology.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
Because then it's treated as sort of kind of a local drive as far as Backblaze is concerned.
Casey:
And so you can upload your Synology and still have a regular consumer plan.
Casey:
So I could go iSCSI, but I've heard Marco say in the past a lot of terrible things about it.
Casey:
And justifiably, like given what you've told me about your experience, I am fearful of going down that road.
Marco:
Nobody should do it.
Casey:
So there you go.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
I've heard some stories about, well, and somebody's saying in the chat right now, well, you can mount it via NFS and do some Unix-y things, and maybe that would work.
Casey:
Okay, maybe.
Casey:
I've had a lot of people recommend using Backblaze B2.
Casey:
Hold on, John.
Casey:
I'm almost done, I promise.
John:
I was going to say, people saying maybe that will work, it does work.
John:
People do do this.
John:
It is the thing you have to futz with, but it absolutely is the thing that works with Backblaze.
John:
You can trick Backblaze into backing up your network share either by using iSCSI like Marco, which no one should do, or by using the various means to mount your thing through NFS or OFS or whatever, and that will work as well, but that's also annoying.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And that's the thing is I want something that's not fiddly because for all the bad things I have to say about CrashPlan, it was not fiddly, which is good.
Casey:
So what was my final option?
Casey:
Oh, Backblaze B2.
Casey:
That's what it was.
Casey:
One of the things that Backblaze is offering is instead of doing the traditional Backblaze home offering,
Casey:
You can do Backblaze B2, and I'm not entirely clear on the delineation between the two, but for the purposes of the conversation so far anyway, it's basically a different kind of storage plan, a different kind of setup where it's half a cent a gigabyte per month in order to back up to there.
Casey:
And if you were to download more than just a pittance, then there's a charge for that.
Casey:
But that would hypothetically work for the Synology.
Casey:
And in fact, either they have software or I think it's actually the Synology itself has a front end that can upload directly to B2 such that it would be very not fiddly.
Casey:
However, I have personally between four and five terabytes of stuff on the Synology that I think is worth backing up.
Casey:
Now, a lot of that is, say, ripped copies of Blu-rays that I still own before anyone starts calling the RIAA.
Casey:
MPAA.
Casey:
That too.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
My bad.
Casey:
Wrong medium.
Casey:
But anyway, yeah, I realized that after you said it.
Casey:
But the point being, I'm not even talking about things that have fallen off of trucks.
Casey:
A lot of this stuff is stuff that I have in Plex for convenience, if nothing else.
Casey:
And I recognize that I could rebuild it and I could perhaps exclude that from the backup.
Casey:
But
Casey:
Here again, my preference is I am willing to throw some modicum of money at this problem in order to make my life easier.
Casey:
This probably sounds familiar given our conversation about Marco selling things.
Casey:
So if I wanted to go to B2, which is my current theory, it equates to roughly 20 bucks a month, which is a far cry from I think the 60-ish dollars a year that
Casey:
That I was giving to CrashPlan.
Casey:
So I think the two most appealing options for me, and then I'm going to stop talking, is go to the CrashPlan small business plan, which is probably approximately the same money I was paying.
Casey:
And it should, in theory, capture the Synology like it used to.
Casey:
And there's a lot of me that's thinking that may be the right answer.
Casey:
Or finally use this as the excuse to divorce from CrashPlan and just use a combination of B2 for the Synology and regular Backblaze for my iMac and just do it that way.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
That is a lot of, I know that was not a very brief summary, but there's a lot here.
Casey:
So let me, I guess, start by saying, Marco, what are your thoughts on iSCSI?
Casey:
And then, John, I think you're in a similar scenario to me, so I'd like to hear your thoughts on a more general level after Marco's.
Marco:
Well, first let me step back a little bit.
Marco:
Let me say my opening statement because I know John's going to give his.
Marco:
I have my chance.
Marco:
I do think it's worth considering how much giant storage you actually need to keep and back up and everything.
Marco:
We as nerds and as computer power users have for years, many of us have kept these giant media libraries, giant media collections.
Marco:
And for some people, yeah, you know, if you actually go and watch those things on a regular basis, maybe it's worth keeping those things.
Marco:
But a lot of us, I think, rip them from, like, this, like, artificial scarcity.
Marco:
Like, when we were growing up and bandwidth wasn't a thing, really, and computer media was hard and rare, you know, it's like Depression-era grandparents.
Marco:
Like, you know, you grew up, like, hoarding this stuff.
Marco:
So now we have these giant hard drives, giant bandwidth, you know, media that's easy to rip off, these giant disks, like...
Marco:
Now we want to hoard it all, right?
Marco:
But the fact is, if you actually want to finally go back and re-watch something that you've been saving all this time, is it really worth having paid all the money in the meantime on discs, on backups of those discs, on electricity to power these things in your house that are on all the time?
Marco:
Suppose you want to watch like one movie a month from your collection.
Marco:
You can just pay like five or ten bucks to buy it or whatever each time you want to watch it.
Marco:
You know, the very few times that you actually want to watch something out of that giant library and you might very well come out ahead.
Marco:
And you also got to think like in that scenario where like suppose you don't store all these files and you occasionally have to rebuy something to watch it again.
Marco:
Might you even not even have to buy it?
Marco:
Like, will it probably be available from like Netflix or Amazon Video or HBO or like some other service that you might already be paying for?
Marco:
Like many of the things that I've ripped, I've ended up never watching because like, oh, I can just get them on Netflix.
Marco:
Also, then you have to deal with... Suppose you have this library of ripped movies.
Marco:
Well, suppose you rip them as DVDs.
Marco:
Then HD comes out.
Marco:
Then Blu-rays come out.
Marco:
Then 4K comes out.
Marco:
Then 4K HDR comes out.
Marco:
By the time you actually want to go back and watch the thing...
Marco:
Is your version of it even still the best quality?
Marco:
Or can you go on the Netflix app on your TV that comes with your TV for free and watch the same thing in 4K now?
Marco:
So I highly suggest that anybody who's dealing with this problem of how do I back up a massive collection of media really do some introspection here as like...
Marco:
do I really need to be storing all this stuff?
Marco:
And if I am storing all this stuff, do I really need to be backing it up as much as I'm backing up like my family photos?
Marco:
Or is this a lot less important?
Marco:
And can I either delete it and stop worrying about all this or not be backing it up in so many different places?
Marco:
So that being said, if you are going to back up stuff like this, you know, we have these network attack storage devices from Synology that they sent us a long time ago.
Marco:
It was very nice of them.
Marco:
Network attack storage devices are very complicated.
Marco:
They're a huge solution to what might be a small problem.
Marco:
If your problem is I need more disk space,
Marco:
a NAS is massive overkill for that problem because they are big, they're expensive, they are entire other computers that you need to manage, you need to run separate software updates because they have their own software, usually they're Linux-based or something, and because they're kind of their own computers, their own kind of servers, but they don't quite run...
Marco:
mac os or windows or you know anything that you're used to using on on a regular computer they have their own special applications they can't run the applications that you might want the processors they run are usually very low end so certain things like plex transcoding are very limited or you need certain models with certain accelerators or whatever else um they're you know running a nas they're very powerful because they are their little app platforms but if
Marco:
If your main problem is I want more disk space for apps that run on a Mac, I would say a NAS is really quite overkill.
Marco:
In the years since we've all gotten these network attack storage NAS things, is it okay to say NAS?
Marco:
I never quite know.
Marco:
Is that like saying NAS or is it actually acceptable?
No.
Casey:
I think it's acceptable, unlike nitrous socks.
Casey:
No, not whatever the nitrous is.
Casey:
This is why our car show is never good.
Casey:
Anyway.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So also in the time since we've gotten these NAS devices, hard drives have gotten way bigger.
Marco:
Like we got these when the biggest disc you could buy at the time was four terabytes.
Marco:
Now you can get 10 terabyte drives.
Marco:
And while the 10 terabyte ones are kind of expensive, they're like about 500 bucks, 8 terabyte ones, which are barely smaller, are like 300 bucks now.
Marco:
These are really... Hard drives are massive.
Marco:
They're way bigger than they were even just a few years ago.
Marco:
And they cost very little per terabyte.
Marco:
The amount of stuff that we need to store, it seems like if you're able to use...
Marco:
full-size, three-and-a-half-inch hard drives, the hard drive capacity has dramatically outpaced our needs for, you know, most of the things we're storing.
Marco:
Like, you're storing, you said, about five terabytes.
Marco:
On my Synology, which I, you know, I have something like 16 terabytes of usable space with the way I've arranged all the drives with RAID and everything.
Marco:
I've used, out of the 16 terabytes, I've used about 10 or 8, but I've used it very irresponsibly.
Marco:
Just, like,
Marco:
Because I knew I had, like, infinite space.
Marco:
So I'm just, like, throwing stuff all over it.
Marco:
Same here.
Marco:
Yeah, tons of duplication, movies that I will probably never watch, stuff like that.
Marco:
Like, I just use it incredibly irresponsibly.
Marco:
Now, if I wanted to store my incredibly irresponsible roughly 10 terabytes of stuff, I could get two 10 terabyte hard drives and put them in RAID 1 and be done.
Marco:
So a NAS, first of all, I don't think the complexity of a NAS makes sense if you're going to have fewer than about five or even eight disks.
Marco:
And if you're going to have it, you know, it's this massive thing.
Marco:
So like if you're going to have a NAS at all, I think you need to have a really good reason for why specifically that's the right approach for you as opposed to any other option that's simpler, that's maybe more local to a computer.
Casey:
You know, I understand and mostly agree with everything you've said.
Casey:
However, I think I would be remiss to not mention that there are a lot of things that MySynology does that I am glad I have the Synology to do it.
Casey:
So as an example, I really like that I can have MySynology act as a VPN endpoint and
Casey:
I really like that I can have my Synology act as a downloader for torrents such as Linux distros and other legal things.
Casey:
Or if I wanted to download some sort of binary from a news group, again, nothing but legal things, then I can do that sort of thing.
Casey:
Now, to be fair, all of those can be done on my iMac.
Casey:
That is also usually on 24-7.
Casey:
But I do like that there is something off to the side that handles these sorts of things.
Casey:
And so I agree with you that if all you're looking for is a big hard drive, there are better ways to solve this problem.
Casey:
But in a lot of cases...
Casey:
You may want just an absurdly large hard drive, which this functions as, and that allows you to treat it as infinite storage because I've done the exact same thing you've done.
Casey:
Or maybe you want to actually leverage some of the features of this computer that's always on on your network.
Casey:
So there's something to be said for that, too.
Marco:
Oh, absolutely.
Marco:
And there are other options for that, too.
Marco:
And so before I forget to cover the iSCSI topic, because I want to then move on to just attaching disks to a Mac, but before I forget to cover iSCSI... So for those unfamiliar, the way iSCSI works in a NAS situation like this is basically...
Marco:
The NAS treats a disk partition.
Marco:
Usually you say, all right, these four disks or whatever, make these into a RAID 5 or RAID 10 set.
Marco:
This is now an iSCSI volume.
Marco:
And then you need to get iSCSI software called an iSCSI initiator for some reason.
Marco:
Not a driver, not software, not an app.
Marco:
It's called an initiator.
Marco:
Don't know why.
Marco:
Don't care.
Marco:
Please don't email me about that.
Marco:
So you get the iSCSI Initiator, which is $200 or so on the Mac because it's not built into macOS.
Marco:
And that allows the Mac to mount that giant block of storage on the NAS as a local disk.
Marco:
and it treats it like a local disk.
Marco:
The applications of the Mac all see it as a local disk, including Backblaze, which is why this works.
Marco:
And the Mac, you actually format this virtual drive from the Mac's file system.
Marco:
You format it as HFS+, or I hope eventually APFS, and then as far as Mac is concerned, that's a hard drive put into it, except it happens to be over your network and being hosted physically by the NAS.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
This has a number of advantages.
Marco:
It does allow things like Backblaze to work.
Marco:
It also lets the Mac think the drive is native.
Marco:
So if you're only using network shared drives in the regular NAS way, where the NAS just opens up shares over NFS or SMB or whatever protocols it's using...
Marco:
Certain things on the Mac don't work very well, like because it's a network share, so it doesn't automap for one, usually.
Marco:
And then things like Spotlight don't work very well, like searching a network share doesn't work very well.
Marco:
Certain applications don't like running on network shares or operating on files on network share, stuff like that.
Marco:
On iSCSI volume, because it is just like dumb block storage over the network,
Marco:
There is no sharing of it.
Marco:
Only one thing can be connected to it at a time.
Marco:
That is its disk.
Marco:
Whatever computer is running the initiator, that's the one that's using it.
Marco:
There's no sharing.
Marco:
You can share it from that computer as a Mac share, which I actually do on mine.
Marco:
But then all the NASA's built-in applications, if there's like a media server application or a Plex on the NASA or whatever else, all these applications can't see this data anymore.
Marco:
Because as far as the NASA is concerned, this is just a big block of bits.
Marco:
It cannot see the file system that's running on it.
Marco:
It is not interacting with it at all.
Marco:
So it's really a pretty big waste of a NASA's capabilities to use iSCSI.
Marco:
Also, iSCSI is fragile.
Marco:
Because you're treating the network like a local disk, it must be on a wired connection.
Marco:
If that connection drops for a second, it unmounts.
Marco:
And that could be damaging your data or whatever else if it comes at the wrong time or whatever else happens.
Marco:
And it's certainly inconvenient if it unmounts.
Marco:
And in general, I don't recommend iSCSI to anybody because you are wasting the NAS's abilities as an application platform
Marco:
you are needing to have another computer be an always-on computer on the network.
Marco:
In my case, it's a Mac Mini.
Marco:
And this Mac Mini does a few different things for me, and it hosts this giant iSCSI volume off the Synology.
Marco:
So you're already using a computer that's on all the time anyway, but using a NAS as basically a giant hard drive enclosure, which is fine if you already have one,
Marco:
But I would never in a million years recommend that anybody who's starting fresh and doesn't already own a NAS do this.
Marco:
It is a terrible idea, and nobody ever should do this.
Casey:
All right, John, you've been very patient.
Casey:
I appreciate it.
Casey:
Tell us your thoughts.
John:
Well, I was going to talk about alternatives to CrashPlan, but now apparently I have to defend the concept of a NAS.
John:
And also the idea of keeping movies on them.
John:
So the one area that I think didn't get mentioned in my market, and one of the main reasons that I use a NAS, aside from the things Casey was talking about, like having a little computer and all the applications, which I do use and enjoy, is that, you know, so the hard drives, these hard drives are big and cheap, 8TB hard drives, 10TB hard drives, whatever.
John:
all that whole discussion was about spinning discs these are all spinning discs they're you know eight terabyte ssds are not cheap all right right you can buy them not cheap right so these are all spinning discs spinning discs are big noisy and hot i like big cheap storage especially for stuff like movies where it's just sequential reads and stuff like that i do not like spinning discs anywhere near me so i like the idea of
John:
Bunch of big, cheap, hot, noisy, expensive disks far, far away from me.
John:
And far, far away means network, means network attached storage.
John:
So even if I just wanted the cheapest bucket of drives to throw crap into, and even if a NAS had no applications, I would still want a NAS just to get those disks far away from me.
John:
And I would only be using them, not for like primary storage, but for very large files that will mostly be read sequentially.
John:
So I wouldn't put my photo library on a NAS.
John:
Don't do that.
John:
You'll probably be sad, right?
John:
I wouldn't put my applications there or anything like that.
John:
Just put big data files there.
John:
And of course, a NAS doesn't just give me a big bucket of stuff.
John:
It gives me all the other things.
John:
So that's why I think about this a lot.
John:
I look at my Synology down there.
John:
I think about it.
John:
If I ripped out all those drives and replaced them all with eight terabytes, how much space would I have?
John:
By the way, unlike the two of you,
John:
i don't know i kind of do know i know how this happened but i'm i have not been using my we have the same amount of storage i've not been using my storage furlessly i've been using it carefully like i i delete i delete movies after i watch them right like if i if i watch a movie and it was crap immediately you know deleted if i rip a movie but then a new version comes out i delete that and rip the the new version right um
John:
I haven't been using it frivolously, and yet my Synology has been basically on the verge of being full, meaning only a few hundred gigabytes available in various volumes for almost its entire life.
John:
The main reason is I do time machine backups to it.
John:
If you have a couple of...
John:
machines with a terabyte internal hard drives plus some external drives both time machine backing up to your Synology your backups get pretty big pretty fast so I've allocated a chunk of it to for backups for my two Macs right that's two terabytes just for their internal drives plus the three other internal drives that are on the Mac Pro and the external drives that are attached to my wife's iMac so that's a couple of terabytes there
John:
And I have that on a RAID set with some redundancy protection.
John:
It's not RAID 0, right?
John:
So there's more drives being used up.
Casey:
Slow down, slow down, slow down.
Casey:
You have your time machine volume with RAID redundancy.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
See, I I I'm not going to say you're wrong there.
Casey:
But when I was asking Marco, because I think Marco had either gotten his synology before me or maybe just set it up before me.
Casey:
I'd ask Marco, you know, how did you do this?
Casey:
And we have eight bay synologies.
Casey:
And what Marco recommended, which I think was a good call, was do... What was it?
Casey:
RAID 0 for two of the physical drives.
Casey:
So basically you're making one large hard drive out of two physical hard drives.
Casey:
But having absolutely no redundancy.
Casey:
And the only thing that goes on that volume...
Casey:
is my time machine backup.
Casey:
So if I drop one, eh, I lose my time machine backups.
Casey:
I cannot tell you the last time I've needed a time machine backup.
Casey:
I still use it because I want it to be there, but I haven't used one in forever.
Casey:
And yes, this is where everyone writes us and says, oh, RAID 0, you should never use that, blah, blah.
Casey:
It's just for time machine.
Casey:
That's it.
Marco:
also i should follow up that i'm i think i i can't tell from here but i think i actually switched it over to raid one when i upgraded its storage capacity a few years later um because but i would also say also like you know it also only makes sense to do raid zero on time machine if time machine is not your primary backup you know which for for us it isn't like i have a super duper clone that's local to to the computer it's like a
Marco:
And so that is my primary backup for my main drive.
Marco:
Time Machine is a convenience historical backup only.
Marco:
I also have cloud backup.
Marco:
We have multiple things.
Marco:
So if Time Machine is one of multiple things and you want to not waste too much hard drive space on it, that's when I recommend using RAID 0 if you're going to do something like this.
Marco:
even today like again like a lot of this made sense back when we were doing it and when we were setting this up like what three years ago um but these days with with the hard drives just so big it really removes a lot of the need to use raid much at all or if you're going to use raid now you can much more often just use raid one which is just straight mirroring and the loss of the disk space doesn't really matter as much
John:
That's less space efficient than the other raid schemes that let you use more of the space.
John:
But yeah, I'm more inclined to use raid zero.
John:
I don't do this now, but I'd be more inclined to use raid zero for my media because media has less churn and there's less versions.
John:
You know, I have super duper clones too, right?
John:
But super duper don't save old versions.
John:
I want to save as many old versions as possible.
John:
And if I had RAID 0 and one of the disks died, I've lost all versions of Time Machine backups for two entire Macs.
John:
Now I have other Time Machine backups, too.
John:
But anyway, that burns a lot of disks.
John:
And then, of course, I have my media.
John:
I don't have...
John:
a lot, a lot of media and I do delete stuff from it, but it adds up because I also have stuff in there like every WWDC video that Apple has ever released in the highest definition, right?
John:
That's the perfect thing for that, right?
John:
And it's like, oh, are you ever going to watch it?
John:
I'm archiving it.
John:
I can't easily get that stuff again.
John:
I have lots of crap like that.
John:
And so that's my Synology basically filled up.
John:
So anyway, I like it.
John:
I like having a NAS.
John:
I like the big spinning noisy disk far away from me.
John:
And despite how huge it is,
John:
I would even want more of it.
John:
And like Casey said before, that's why I'm using CrashPlan and not Backblaze is because, you know, on my Mac, I use Backblaze.
John:
On my wife's Mac, I use CrashPlan.
John:
And on her Mac, I mount the Synology and I have CrashPlan back up the Synology volumes just like any other thing.
John:
because it does network backups now crash plan like backblaze is a flat fee for unlimited data and like casey i take advantage of that and i have about five terabytes pushed up the crash plan it's like you said on the you know you said enter as many times as you want so i did um that's just for jason snell i probably blew the quote sorry jason um so yeah so it was a great deal right and maybe that's why they're not offering it anymore it was like we can't afford to do that
John:
So I'm in the same situation as Casey where they're sunsetting their consumer product and I have to figure out what I'm going to do about it.
John:
I forget how much I'm paying for a crash plan per year, but it's super cheap, especially for the amount of data I'm putting on it.
John:
the offer they have for the small business thing uh it's uh at least twice as expensive as the consumer one but still only like ten dollars a month per device for people with multiple devices that's a problem but i've only got one one device is my wife's mac that i'm doing that with
John:
so i don't mind that much the small business thing we'll have a link to the uh the crash plan fact one of the the questions on the fact is can i still move to crash plan for small business even if i'm not a small business the answer yes you can anyone can migrate like i don't why is it it's just called small business you don't have to be a small business although annoyingly they make you enter a company name so i entered some bogus thing or whatever but you do not have to be a small business use a small business and it's ten dollars per month per device but
John:
If you're a current CrashPlan subscriber, there's an apology price for one year that is 75% off.
John:
So it's $2.50 a month to upload unlimited data to CrashPlan.
John:
And if you already have a CrashPlan thing, you don't have to re-upload your 5 terabytes.
John:
it will migrate your existing five terabyte backup, and you'll just continue as normal.
John:
That deal was too good for me to pass up.
John:
$2.50 a month for a year, starting at the end of my current subscription that was extended for 60 days for unlimited backup?
John:
Yes, please, right?
John:
Even when it goes up to $10 a month, I might keep paying it just for the convenience.
John:
I'm pretty sure I'm still running the Java application.
John:
And no, it's not the most efficient thing in the world.
John:
And it fills my disk with big files and takes a lot of memory and does stuff.
John:
But in general, I have enough control to make it lay off when I'm using the computer and only run when I'm not using it.
John:
And for the most part, it's done its job.
John:
They do, you know, it does a pretty good job of finding the files.
John:
and backing them up and i just i just can't beat that pricing right and so after at the end of at the end of 2018 when uh my gravy train ends and i have to decide whether i want to start paying ten dollars a month for my five terabyte backup uh that i might be like okay that's you know i'll just unsubscribe from hulu or whatever the hell streaming service that i haven't used in a long time take that money and and put it towards this
John:
Or I might use one of the alternatives they released.
John:
But for now, the sort of, what's the least I can do to not have to think about this problem until the end of 2018?
John:
It was...
John:
do the small business migration.
John:
A lot of people are mad at CrashPlan, like, oh, I'm never giving them a business, blah, blah, blah.
John:
They should have handled the transition better.
John:
Arguably, the 60-day extension could have been like a one-year extension or whatever, but there's no real easy way to do this.
John:
I made a plea to Backblaze, which I use and enjoy, but it doesn't do network volumes on Twitter, which is where you interact with brands, in case you didn't know.
John:
Sorry, where you engage with brands.
John:
I engaged with the brand on Twitter.
John:
And I said, hey, I would love it if you could back up network shares.
John:
And the disembodied voice of Backblaze, the corporation said on Twitter, unfortunately, they left out a comma, our business model would need a lot of reworking for us to offer NAS slash server for a fixed rate.
John:
So basically it's like we don't, you know, what I said to them back was like, you know, so obviously they can't, they would need to figure out how they can pay for that.
John:
I said, well, you don't need to.
John:
do what crash plan did which is whatever the thing was like 60 a year for unlimited all you need to do is match crash plan small business because crash plan for home is gone you don't have to match their price anymore like apparently that was an unsustainable model right presumably crash plan for small business is a sustainable model at ten dollars per month per device so i would love it if backblaze did that even if they put a limit on they said like like you know
John:
five terabytes for ten dollars uh a month per device uh including network things you know like i would i would try that right so i don't know what they're going to do there i think b2 is their preferred solution for that which is not really a service it's it's a play on s3 it's just like a storage back end um but it has i think the cheapest rates let me look at i have their pricing page up anyone else yeah i'm pretty sure it's the cheapest like large online block storage thing
John:
yeah so it's a 0.005 cents per gigabyte per month for storage and 0.02 uh oh no it's not um i the damn dollar sign in front i'm sorry i was gonna say my calculations are all wrong half a cent
John:
for uh storage and two cents per gigabyte for download and it it is less than s3 and azure and google cloud which are the ones they put in here they also have a price calculator at the bottom where you can say here's what my initial upload is here's what my monthly upload is here's my monthly delete and my monthly download and it will price it out for you and it's not that bad my for my data to
John:
For reasonable values, it comes out to like $20 or $30 a month.
John:
But that's still three times what $10 a month is.
John:
But that's just storage.
John:
And Synology can back up directly to B2, so I could do that.
John:
But when I asked on Twitter, as soon as this announcement was made, okay, what's everybody's favorite...
John:
thing that will back up a mac including a nas and in that tweet just to save my try to save myself a little didn't work but tried to save myself a little time i said what's the best thing that on the mac that backs up to a nas um or the backs up network attached drives uh is it arc or is it something else because i knew everyone was going to say arc yeah i know about arc and i wanted to preempt them by saying
John:
Yes, I'm aware of Arc.
John:
I'm checking in with everybody to see, is there something else out there that's better?
John:
And some people did get alternate suggestions that I looked at, but then a thousand people replied, you should try Arc.
John:
Anyway, Arc is a Mac application, a third-party Mac application that will back up your Mac.
John:
It's been in development for a long time now.
John:
And it's sort of novel thing is that you choose and pay for whatever storage backend you want.
John:
So if you want to pay for Amazon Glacier or Amazon Drive or S3 or B2, ARK will back up to any of them.
John:
ARK is a backup program and just says, just point me at your...
John:
place where you want me to put the data and it will put its data there and its format or whatever it does blah blah but you have to choose the storage uh thing and you pay for the storage thing so and you could change like you could you know stop paying for b2 and switch to amazon drive or something presumably you have to you know transfer your backup over there whatever
John:
so it's a nice divorce from the backup program and the storage backend and a lot of people use that and they enjoy it and they've been successful with it but given the storage backend pricing none of these come close to matching crash plans pricing pricing or backblazers pricing for that matter if you're not doing network attached storage so it seems like arc is sort of the power user fancy thing where you get to pick the components and assemble it but if you have a huge amount of data like i do
John:
It just can't match the price of one of these all you can eat things and the all that you can eat things.
John:
I'm being subsidized by people who back up like 100 megs.
John:
Right.
John:
That's how they can be so cheap is because I'm paying the same amount per month for backblazer for crash plan as somebody who backs up like their 100 megabyte little folder of stuff.
John:
Right.
John:
And so that's how Amazon can you know, that's how these services can afford to give you the flat rate because most people.
John:
don't upload five terabytes it's just the stinkers like me and casey that are you know ruining it for everybody else right but but you know that's how they have to figure out their sort of you know histogram of how much people upload and make all the math work out whereas things like s3 and b2 where they're just selling you storage they just charge you for the storage like it's all you know it's all completely chunked out it's like well we're just a storage back end and you don't get the two
John:
You don't get to pay us less for your storage just because someone else stores a little bit less than our thing, right?
John:
It's exactly dollars per gigabyte, very granular service that doesn't care what you're doing with the storage.
John:
You just pay for what you use.
John:
And plus the paying for transfers is another thing that really bites you depending on how much transfers you do.
John:
So...
John:
That was my choice for now, is that basically I'm punting it down the road.
John:
I'm going to continue using CrashPlan for as long as I can.
John:
Also, because I don't want to upload five terabytes to any place else again.
John:
I mean, I have a fast connection, but that would take a long time.
John:
And during that time, I would have no cloud backups of my thingies.
John:
To get back to Marco's point about not backing up, not even having stuff on there in the first place for like ripped movies that you're never going to watch and other big stuff like that.
John:
You could just, you know, pay $5 to get it online or stream it from Netflix or whatever.
John:
That only works for the people who aren't using a NAS like Casey was just describing where they're or like I have tried to do but had to bail on and may try again.
John:
about ripping blu-rays without recompressing them right because there is nothing i'm recompressing them i'm not a complete animal like you are all right well anyway a lot of people rip them and don't recompress them just so they don't have to deal with blu-ray discs which as has been established on the show are terrible right so you just get rid of everything except for the movie the actual movie file you hit play and it starts playing the movie right that actually is not a bad idea at all yeah but but the thing is they're humongous um and
John:
Even if you watch them rarely, it's like, oh, it's easier just to buy it on iTunes.
John:
You can't get a 4K... If you have a 4K Blu-ray thing, a UHD Blu-ray, and you rip that losslessly, there is nothing you can get online streaming that can match that quality.
John:
There's just nothing.
John:
It's not even close.
John:
Even 4K Netflix is just so massively compressed compared to what you get off of that plastic disc.
John:
So if you care about that and you have some giant NAS somewhere with all these 50 to 100 gigabyte rips of these things, right...
John:
there is no like oh i'll just get it online if you don't care about that well then why are you ripping a bunch of movies to you know i guess to get rid of the menus whatever but then the marco system starts to look better and better the less you care about the quality of your stuff right um i'm kind of in the middle where i do care about it but i don't have any way to play things like that on there so sometimes i have
John:
like versions of things for kids on there with like english dubs and other more rare material sometimes i i've transferred things from my tivo to there to free up space on my tivo which is terrible because the compression is anyway it's bad i don't do that it's dumb but it has happened um so there's a lot of churn in it but uh
John:
it's not always the case that you can or even if it's something like home movies like i have all of my all my home movies taken with my camcorder because i'm old and my kids are old now and my camcorder right i need to get that the video off of the cam it was dv at least it's not analog off of the camcorder and someplace else it's all ripped to the synology then all gets backed up so if i had to do sort of like a trimming and say you can't back up five terabytes anymore deal with it
John:
um i would try to stop backing up all of my media that is replaceable but i would still back up like all my apple videos i would still back up all my kids videos uh and stuff like that and that's probably like half of the stuff because i don't have that many movies i mean i think i've shared my plex thing with with both of you guys like
John:
there's not that many movies in there like my my movie collection is mostly on shelves on plastic discs and i still take them out of the containers and put them in i just did it this weekend i took a thing out of a plastic disc out of a case and put it into a slot and watched a movie it's a thing i still do it was a like an animal yeah it was a blu-ray it was criterion collection and it was it looked really good um it's not not 4k though but soon like marco said i'll have to be getting the 4k versions of all of my favorite movies which is fine i'm fine with it but anyway um
John:
Yeah, so CrashPlan, sad.
John:
Don't poo-poo the small business thing.
John:
Take a look at it.
John:
ARK seems to be the consensus for other things that you might want to try.
John:
And if you don't have network-attached disks, backblaze.
Casey:
I think you've convinced me that I should just bite the bullet and move to small business because that is definitely the price performer.
Casey:
Didn't you tweet earlier, Casey, that there was a five terabyte limit on it?
Marco:
No, I don't think so.
Marco:
I checked.
Marco:
It's unlimited.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So then if it's basically the same thing you were getting before, just now it's going to be $10 a month after the apology period instead of $5?
Marco:
Yeah, bite the bullet.
Marco:
That's still a pretty good deal for unlimited space with network volumes.
Marco:
Backblaze beats it by, I think, about half for local files, but to include network files in that, just pay it.
Marco:
That's fine.
Marco:
They're really showing you a price hike here, but that's totally fine.
Marco:
Your other alternatives are all going to be more disruptive and probably more expensive.
Marco:
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Marco:
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That's Betterment.com slash ATP.
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Rethink what your money can do.
Marco:
We've talked about doing a NAS.
Marco:
We've talked about doing a NAS with iSCSI.
Marco:
We've talked about trying to just not need any of this.
Marco:
What if you still need lots of storage and you don't want a NAS?
Marco:
And I wanted to close my topic, hopefully this topic, with the other option, which is if I were starting over today, how would I do it?
Marco:
Because the only reason I have iSCSI on my NAS now is because I already had a NAS full of big disks.
Marco:
And I'm like, well, I already have all this hardware.
Marco:
Might as well use it.
Marco:
What I would do today if I was starting fresh, I already have a Mac mini server in my home.
Marco:
I would just get a small number, probably either two or four, eight terabyte or 10 terabyte disks, put them into very basic enclosures that have pretty much no intelligence to them whatsoever, and plug them into the Mac mini.
Marco:
and have it be in the basement or garage or whatever else so the noise doesn't bother me or just in the closet and just run either no RAID whatsoever or the built-in Mac OS X RAID or there's an app called SoftRAID that is almost certainly the best option for any kind of advanced use as software RAID on the Mac.
Marco:
It's kind of expensive.
Marco:
It's $180 for the full one with RAID 5 or if you just need RAID 1 or 0, it's $50.
Marco:
And again, these days, you can get two 8-terabyte drives for a total of $600.
Marco:
You get SoftRaid Light Edition for $50, put them in RAID 1, and you have really safe 8 terabytes of storage for under $1,000.
Marco:
You just built a macOS NAS, you realize.
Marco:
Yes, I know.
Marco:
So basically, here's where this benefits.
Marco:
The downside, I think, is obvious that you have to then run on a Mac OS.
Marco:
You won't get some of the advanced RAID features.
Marco:
Most NASAs these days, including the synologies we have, have some kind of system to automatically expand, or at least somewhat gracefully, expand capacity down the road without having to blow away your whole volume.
Marco:
This is a system similar to what Drobo has offered for years.
Marco:
Drobo made it famous, but Drobo is terrible.
Marco:
Nobody should ever use Drobos.
Marco:
They are incredibly unreliable.
Marco:
If you ask around, you will see so many horror stories from people who have trusted Drobo and have had that trust be violated.
Marco:
So I would not recommend Drobo.
Marco:
And, you know, so other NASAs offer features like that where you can expand volumes over time by replacing a small hard drive with a big one and then letting the thing rebuild.
Marco:
And then eventually you can replace the next drive with another big one, let that rebuild and everything.
Marco:
it's a slow process but it does indeed work um you can't do that with iSCSI unfortunately because it you know iSCSI has to be that one big block and can't resize a file system that doesn't know about um you also as far as i know can't do that if you do a direct attached mac method like what i'm what i'm saying here like just get some drivers plug them into a mac um as far as i know you can't do that in any way on the mac that's at all reasonable except if you use a drobo which again you should not do um
Marco:
Other than losing dynamic expansion, though, a lot of the other stuff I actually find to either be a wash on the Mac or to be better.
Marco:
So software-wise, if you think about all the stuff, Casey, you run on your Synology, you run Plex, you run a VPN server, you run photo hosting.
Marco:
I honestly don't know what VPN server options exist for Mac OS, but I'm sure they exist.
Casey:
Oh, definitely.
Marco:
You can definitely run Plex because I do, and so I know that works.
Marco:
It's even better because you have more processing power, right?
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
To quickly interrupt and to be absolutely clear, the particular NAS that we have, it is not powerful enough to be the Plex host.
Casey:
So really, my Plex host is the iMac.
Casey:
It's simply serving the content off of the Synology.
John:
It's totally powerfully enough.
John:
I use my Synology as my primary Plex server.
John:
Only when I have in the rare case where it can't transcode, I switch to the iMac Plex server.
Casey:
So, you know, this is an aside that I wouldn't have interrupted had I realized we were going down, but since I've interrupted, here we are.
Casey:
What I noticed was when I first started using the Synology with Plex being served on the Synology, it could not keep up with the media I was looking at at the time.
Casey:
However, I have been extremely diligent for literally years to
Casey:
that anytime I add something to the Synology, I make sure I convert it to MP4.
Casey:
So hopefully it can send that natively to whatever Apple-based client I am viewing it upon.
Casey:
And it's rare I use anything to look at Plex other than an iPad or an Apple TV or something like that.
Casey:
So I wonder if it actually isn't that bad as long as I'm not doing like an MKV or something like that, which sometimes is already in H.264 anyway.
John:
but i guess that's a roundabout way of saying i should probably try that again but and mess with the settings like go to original quality so it allows it to do with not transcoding and it doesn't have to be m4v or mp4 it can be mkv like i've had a lot of success but obviously h265 forget it like if anything's h265 uh i worry that my iMac is not going to be able to do it until you know high sierra or whatever but the synology can't do it but if we're
John:
I just like it's my go to like that's this when I have the big choice of which Plex thing do you want to pick Synology is the one I pick only after I try it first and it fails actually if I try it first and it fails the next thing I usually try is Infuse on my Apple TV where it does the supposedly does the decoding on the Apple TVs
John:
Yeah.
John:
And then my third choice is Plex on the iMac.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And well, so the reason I brought all this up, and I'm sorry for interrupting, Marco, but the reason I brought this up is to say you're right, that I'm using my iMac to serve Plex, and that's basically what you're talking about doing as well.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
If you have basically a headless Mac that is running as a server in your house, and it doesn't have to be a Mac Mini.
Marco:
It can be just an old laptop or something.
Marco:
It can be anything.
Marco:
I think it's important, though, that it's serving literally a server role, that it is not used for anything else, and then you can put it somewhere so it's out of the way, so you don't have to deal with...
Marco:
Hard drive noise, like what John hates, if you don't like the full-size hard drives.
Marco:
And you can dedicate it to roles.
Marco:
So not only can you do things like we were talking about Plex and stuff, you can also do things that are exclusive to Apple platforms.
Marco:
Like I mentioned last week or two weeks ago that I actually have...
Marco:
my server Mac mini logged into iCloud photos and the photos app downloads originals to that Mac mini.
Marco:
And then back plays backs up those originals from that Mac mini, even though in addition to the ones that I have on my main computer, just because it's one more place you can have your originals.
Marco:
And then maybe,
Marco:
You can have a laptop that doesn't have a hard drive big enough to store your originals, but you know you have your originals on this other computer in your house that is being backed up to a cloud backup service.
Marco:
Also, because it's a Mac, you can use any of the cloud backup services.
Marco:
You can use Arc, you can use Backblaze, you can use CrashPlan, anything else.
Marco:
If it runs on the Mac, you can run on this.
Marco:
Unlike, you know, on a NAS, you're limited to whatever handful of services have clients for that NAS.
Marco:
But on a Mac, you can use any of them, right?
Marco:
And you can also do things, you know, you can do network time machine, you know, again, NASA's can do that too.
Marco:
But you can do things like Xcode bots that NASA's can't do.
Marco:
You can run other Mac software, like I have a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner, and the ScanSnap software is hideous and requires the ugliest icon I've ever seen to be running in your dock all the time.
Marco:
So I've run them on the Mac Mini, so I don't have to have it on my main computer.
Marco:
There's also occasional other server things that some people need in their house, media-related things, development-related things.
Marco:
I run my Ubiquiti Unify controller app on there.
Marco:
Just stuff that you have to run on a Mac all the time for some reason for your home.
Marco:
Having a Mac server is... This isn't for everybody, of course.
Marco:
I would say it's a luxury.
Marco:
But compared to a NAS, I think just a Mac server with a small number of giant hard drives plugged into it
Marco:
is actually more competitive today for what most people need than getting some big NAS like a Synology.
Marco:
The only other thing I will add to this is I would say if you run a Mac Mini headless, which means with no display put into it,
Marco:
You have probably had weird little issues with the video.
Marco:
Whether it doesn't wake from sleep, screen sharing doesn't come up right, or it comes up all black, or the performance just sucks.
Marco:
OS X does weird things when there's no display plugged in.
Marco:
Amazon, you can get a $10 HDMI display emulator.
Marco:
It's a little black dongle that plugs into the HDMI port on the back of a Mac Mini or the side of any old laptop.
Marco:
And it emulates a display with just a couple of resistors inside.
Marco:
That's why it's $10, a little plug thing.
Marco:
It makes the Mac think that a 4K display is connected to it.
Marco:
So it will run at 4K resolution through the screen sharing thing that you're using or any resolution between 0 and 4K.
Marco:
And it fixes all those problems.
Marco:
It wakes from sleep immediately with any kind of screen sharing.
Marco:
It's fast.
Marco:
The animations are all smooth.
Marco:
It makes it rock solid.
Marco:
I ran a Mac Mini headless for a few years without one of these.
Marco:
Then I learned about this and got one.
Marco:
It makes a massive difference.
Marco:
I highly recommend anybody running a Mac Mini headless.
Marco:
Go on Amazon.
Marco:
Get this here.
Marco:
We'll put the link in the show notes.
Marco:
It is called the CompuLab 4K Display Emulator.
Marco:
It's $10.
Marco:
It completely changes running a Mac Mini headless.
Casey:
So, sad times with CrashPlan, but sounds like we might have a solution.
Casey:
And the solution is more CrashPlan.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
Sad times with CrashPlan.
Marco:
The solution is pay them more money.
John:
Or pay them less money.
John:
It's actually half the price we were paying for for the next year.
John:
Because, you know, $250 a month.
John:
You can't beat $250 a month for unlimited backup with network backup stuff.
John:
So, you got a whole year grace period to evaluate ARC and decide what you're doing and so on and so forth.
John:
That's why, by the way, for you mentioned, Marco, about like things that you care the most about, like you should be backing up your photos way more carefully than you're backing up like your ripped movies and stuff like that.
John:
And I totally am.
John:
And that's why I like having and paying for all these other things that aren't technically backup things like paying for a terabyte of Google Drive space and using the Google backup app to back up my photos.
John:
like it's not it doesn't think it's backing them up it thinks oh you're using google photos look you have like 90 000 photos on google photos you must be using it's like no i'm using you as a backup that you are just another backup of just my photos right and you don't know you're another backup and i like it that way and you have redundant copies of pictures and you somehow slurp down the edits of my photos in addition to the original like i don't care like your purpose is to be one more backup uh and you know a terabyte of of google drive space
John:
is more expensive than i'm paying for crash planet but it's just like uh you know ecosystem variety don't rely on one thing don't rely on one company on one service on one technique on one kind of backup even got incremental backups we got clone backups we've got i don't even know i'm a backup all i know is i'm getting a bunch of photos uploaded to me backups that's what you need and you know all the other hard drive backups and time machine and everything else and that's
John:
that's what helps me sleep at night with my backups is having a lot of them and having them all be very different in both corporation and even type and so crash plan not being perfect and being weird and having problems i'm able to deal with that because it's like oh i wasn't crash mine is not my only off-site backup of the things i care about most in the world not by a long shot like i've got you know photos in the cloud from apple as well so my photos are in
John:
three cloud locations three and a half because i do back up some of them from my mac with backblaze too but anyway um i'm hoping that my drive sizes will get bumped up and i guess that will probably cause me to pay even more for cloud storage but uh
John:
uh as you know as the spinning hard drive prices have come down ssd prices have come down you can get two terabyte ssds for about the same price as i got my one terabyte ssd so things are going in the right direction i'm just hoping cloud storage starts dropping as well because i don't want my hard drives to be creeping up but cloud storage to be about the same price for the next five years because that will make me sad
Marco:
Also, my one final tip, do not use Amazon Glacier for anything.
Marco:
It is awful.
Marco:
Even with ARK, ARK tries its best.
Marco:
It puts in a valiant effort.
Marco:
But Amazon Glacier is the worst.
Marco:
Do not use it.
Marco:
If you need really cheap storage, use Backblaze B2.
Marco:
Anyway, thanks for our three sponsors this week.
Marco:
Betterment, Hover, and Aftershocks, and mysteriously not Backblaze, for sponsoring this show this week.
Marco:
And we'll see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Casey:
All right, Marco, tell me about your home security experiences of late.
John:
A lot of bike thieves are stalking his house these days.
John:
He's got to get a new bike every day.
John:
It's a honeypot for bike thieves.
Marco:
My goodness.
Marco:
Well, if you would have asked me before I had this experience, which company is best at AI type problems?
Marco:
I would have said, you know, Apple is not so good at AI type problems, you know, and Google is the best, right?
Marco:
Or something like that.
Marco:
Probably Google would be the best.
John:
The turnout Logitech is the best.
Marco:
We were, you know, we were leaving our home for an extended time and we had the bright idea.
Marco:
You know what?
Marco:
Let's put up some security cameras so that we can see if anybody breaks into our house or whatever.
Marco:
Or we can just check on things, make sure that like, you know, see if there's like a tree branch that lands in our front yard or anything weird like that.
Marco:
Let's just put up a couple of cameras and give us peace of mind while we are away for a while.
Marco:
I did some research, and it did appear from my research.
Marco:
And the world of home security cameras, or just home video cameras or security cameras at all, it leads into this community of ultra-paranoid crazy gun people pretty quickly.
Marco:
Neat.
Marco:
So this is a world that I have avoided for some time because it starts getting into this weird paranoia community of craziness that I don't respond well to or want to be a part of.
Marco:
So I didn't want something that was going to be too crazy, too complicated.
Marco:
I could host things myself in my own house using my crazy NAS and have IP cameras that record to it using all sorts of crazy...
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And it pretty much led me to the best ones were the Nest Cams, formerly the Drop Cams.
Marco:
Now it's Nest Cams, which is owned by Google or Alphabet.
Marco:
I can't even keep track anymore, but who cares?
Marco:
It's owned by Google.
Marco:
And Nest Cams advertise all these wonderful features, like being able to recognize people in the frame and be able to only alert you when it sees a person in the frame and not just a leaf blowing by or a moth or something.
Marco:
And in addition to all the AI stuff, everyone pretty much agreed that the Nest cameras had the best video quality of pretty much anything out there.
Marco:
And they could see better in the dark and stuff like that.
Marco:
So I thought, okay, if the only downside of the Nest cams seems to be the cost, well, I'll pay more upfront for something good if it really is better.
Marco:
So let's give them a try.
Marco:
So I got two of the advanced ones for Inside, the new Crazy IQ ones, where the first review is Merlin telling you that you can't rotate the image.
Marco:
And I completely agree with him, by the way.
Marco:
That is BS.
Marco:
And then I got two of the regular outdoor, Nescam outdoor ones for the outside.
John:
You don't know this yet, but on an upcoming RecDiffs, I talk about my purchase of the selfsame Nest IQ camera.
John:
I just got one of them.
John:
I argue with Merlin about his review of it, so I won't go over it all here.
John:
But anyway, I actually have one of these as well.
John:
So go on.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
I cannot believe how incredibly crappy these cameras are.
Marco:
The picture quality is not great.
Marco:
I can't believe this is the best that we can do.
Marco:
Every phone in the world does better than these cameras for video quality.
Marco:
So I can't believe that this is really the best we can do.
Marco:
The online streaming of these videos from Google, like from Nest, this is a Google company.
Marco:
The online streaming is laggy and crappy.
Marco:
The interface to browsing the videos is horrendously clunky and crappy and
John:
You're talking about it from the web or from the app?
Marco:
Both.
Marco:
They're both horrendous and clunky in different ways, but they're both horrendous and clunky.
Marco:
Yeah, the app, you know, typical of Nest, you know, I've had Nest thermostats for a while.
Marco:
It's one of the reasons I decided to do this.
Marco:
I was like, well, I already have a Nest account.
Marco:
I already have Nest devices.
Marco:
I already have the Nest app set up on my phone and my wife's phone, so it would be trivial to add this, and then I don't have to deal with anyone else's crappy apps.
Marco:
At least, you know, the devil you know.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Getting it all set up, it was fine.
Marco:
I was disappointed by all the quality, the apps and everything.
Marco:
Then it came time for them to actually do their job and alert me when they saw people in certain spots in the frame.
Marco:
These things are the stupidest things I've ever seen.
Marco:
There have been apps for the Mac forever that you can use the built-in webcam on the Mac to do similar things like this, to be a little security camera and stuff.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure those apps that I used like 10 years ago to try that out were better and more advanced than Google with their advanced AI and everything and Nest.
Marco:
It is so crappy at trying to recognize what is a person and what isn't.
Marco:
Even with their highest end camera, even with their highest end IQ service that you're paying every month for, they're terrible.
Marco:
It thinks everything is a person.
Marco:
I guess no one at Google tested the fact that maybe sun might be in the frame sometimes.
Marco:
Like maybe you might have windows that let some sun in.
Marco:
And so throughout the day, the pattern of light on the floor will slowly move.
Marco:
That they think is a person every time.
Marco:
They think no motion at all as a person.
Marco:
I have one that includes a view of the street in front of my house in the corner of the frame.
Marco:
Every single time a car passes by, it says, your front yard camera thinks it saw a person.
Marco:
they are horrendous it is totally useless because i have to turn down all the alert thresholds because everything it sees every bit of motion every leaf that blows by every time the sun slightly moves as it does every day every single thing it sees it thinks is a person i am stunned at how bad these are and i can't like i expected so much more from google and
Marco:
Because they're supposed to be good at this stuff.
Marco:
They're supposed to be like the leaders of the world in image recognition and intelligence in these kinds of ways.
Marco:
And the fact that it works so horrendously, and I'll even help it out.
Marco:
I'll be like, all right, fine.
Marco:
I don't care if there's a person in my front yard.
Marco:
We'll leave that alone.
Marco:
How about just tell me if there's a person on my front porch?
Marco:
Here's a little rectangle.
Marco:
I'll draw you the porch.
Marco:
You can tell where it is.
Marco:
Tell me if you see a person in this area.
Marco:
nope still every time like you know a leaf blows by oh we think we saw a person you know the sun moves here's a person nope nope it's never a person i i give apple full credit now i thought all these years apple needs to catch up to google with image recognition turns out google image recognition is total garbage and i am i now apologize to apple forever insulting their efforts because my god the rest of the industry is no better
John:
So this is Nest, not Google.
John:
I don't know whose image recognition is at fault there.
John:
But anyway, I have the same thing, and my expectations were much lower than yours, I think, because I assumed all these security cameras were crap.
John:
And I was pleasantly surprised.
John:
Mine detected all the faces, and I went through the app and told them all the faces that it recognized, and it never alerts me again about any of the faces that it already knows.
John:
It tells me when there is a legit person or legit motion, which is my dog.
John:
That's why I have the camera.
John:
I'm watching my dog during the day.
John:
It has never sent me a false alert at all.
John:
Now, granted, it's pointed an internal room and not at a window, but the sun does move and the sun does move across the room during the time.
John:
Like, I agree with you that the image quality is not great, but people say that this is the best of the security cameras, whatever.
John:
But the fact that I can have it on and have it not send me alerts when anybody in my family walks through the room, but do send me alert, like when the dog walker walks in the room because I haven't had the dog walker's face, that's exactly what I want it for, and it does it exactly as advertised.
John:
I've gotten no...
John:
false alarms maybe it's missing the the cat burglars that are coming into my house and and it's doing a crappy job there and obviously the apps aren't great and i wish they had more control especially as scheduling interacts with the uh geofence alerting but the geofence alerting works too when i leave the house with my phone it automatically turns the camera on because i'm away like i was pleasantly surprised because i expected the worst because you read all the reviews of all these things and they're all terrible
John:
And I was pleasantly surprised that the IQ features that I thought were probably going to be stupid actually make the thing useful for me.
John:
Now, I don't have it pointed outside where there's a lot more motion, and I'm not trying to look for, like, people on my porch.
John:
I'm just pointing it at my dog during the day so it is a more limited use case.
John:
But for that limited use case, I think it's fine.
John:
It's overpriced, and you're right about the camera being not as good as it should be for that price.
John:
But...
John:
It's doing the job I wanted it to do.
Casey:
So I'm a little surprised, Marco, that you didn't dive into the world of, I think it's IP cameras.
Casey:
I don't know if that's the right terminology.
Casey:
But my dad, he has a different Synology, a much smaller one.
Casey:
I think it's a 214 Play, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, anyways, he wanted to have a view of his driveway because there's not a lot of windows in the house that can show him a view of the driveway.
Casey:
And so he put an IP camera of some designation.
Casey:
I'm not entirely clear what it was.
Casey:
And wired Ethernet from that camera through the house, which admittedly is a pain.
Casey:
I'm not trying to just fluff over that.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
He wired it into a power over Ethernet hub or switch or whatever.
Casey:
Again, I'm talking a little outside my comfort zone here.
Casey:
And then coincidentally, bringing this back around, that camera is plugged into, in a figurative sense, plugged into the Synology.
Casey:
So the Synology is watching the camera and taking...
Casey:
taking recordings of the camera, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
And there's software on the Synology that is built exactly for this.
Casey:
And so since you have the Synology sitting in the house, I'm a little bit surprised you didn't go that route because I don't see the IQ part in that camera.
Casey:
You know, it's just a camera and nothing more.
Casey:
So like John, for you, it certainly would not have worked.
Casey:
But if you're just pointing it out the outside world, it might have solved the problem pretty well if, and this is a big if, you're willing to get an Ethernet cable to it.
Marco:
Well, and, I mean, the main reason I didn't look at solutions like that, I mean, in the past when I've had, like, the duck camera in the backyard and stuff, I actually have a few.
Marco:
I have, like, two IP cameras.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, I forgot about that.
Marco:
And so I know this world slightly.
Marco:
And by trying to do this world with those...
Marco:
That turned me off so much to that world that when it came time that we wanted to do this, first of all, we had this idea to do this a few days before we were going to leave.
Marco:
Or a week before we were going to leave.
Marco:
I didn't have a lot of time.
Marco:
It was kind of a blessing.
Marco:
I can't spend a lot of time on the solution to this problem.
Marco:
If we're going to do this, I have to do something simple.
Marco:
I have to just throw some money at it and make the problem go away, hopefully.
Marco:
And that's what we did.
Marco:
In retrospect, the correct solution to the problem was something we came up with a few days after that, which was, why don't we just get a safe deposit box at the bank and put expensive stuff in that?
Marco:
And it costs way less.
Marco:
Because the problem is, here's the problem.
Marco:
What if somebody breaks into my house and I have a video of that?
Marco:
What do I do with that exactly?
Marco:
The video that I'm going to have is going to be pretty low quality.
Marco:
It might be in the dark, so it might just be with the IR camera.
Marco:
And it's going to be a video of some burglar whose face is going to be like 16 pixels total in this video.
Marco:
Ha ha ha.
Marco:
And I'm going to give it to the police, and they're going to do what exactly with that?
Marco:
Like, it's not like I'm going to be dealing with, like, the FBI with top-notch national databases of criminals, and they're going to be able to swivel their face around, like, CSI and see, ooh, this is this criminal.
Marco:
No, it's going to be, like, some, you know, crazy, desperate person.
Marco:
Like, it's not going to be, like... I'm not going to be able to, like, get my stuff back with this.
Marco:
It's totally useless.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
So I'm buying this with the idea that this will somehow keep my stuff safer or I'll have some recourse if someone steals all my stuff.
Marco:
But that's really probably not true in practice.
John:
It's fine doing it to find out if your house is flooding or if a tree branch found something or if a raccoon has somehow penetrated your home and is busily shredding every one of your cereal boxes or some other thing where you can have a neighbor come by and shoot out of the house with a broom.
John:
I don't think it's so much fun.
John:
i mean for theft i know they might be called security camera i mean obviously i'm using mine to look at my dog to make sure my dog hasn't escaped its pen and you know isn't freaking out and peeing and pooping all over the house like you know peace of mind but definitely not for theft although i do have the uh the ring uh stick up cam like the ring non-doorbell camera i've been using that to because someone did steal one of my i think it was my second gen ipod touch which is kind of a shame they stole that out of my oh yeah i remember that
John:
And so now I have a camera on that zone.
John:
And, you know, of course, that means nothing will ever happen again.
John:
But, you know, that one's pretty good with the alerts, too.
John:
It sends me an alert at work when, like, the FedEx guy comes.
John:
Because I use the FedEx app to tell them for one delivery to deliver my packages to a different location than my front door.
John:
And now for every FedEx package, they deliver it to a location that is not my front door.
John:
And so every time they walk by that camera,
John:
you know oh a package is arriving and there's the person and you know you see the landscapers and other stuff like that so it works okay like but i'm i have no illusions about security it's more like knowing oh hey did that package come or not like i don't think i even have notifications on for it i can just go to the app and say oh did that package come today scroll scroll oh yep there's the guy
Marco:
that is the only use i found for these so far it's not about security it's about basically showing me things are okay i can see that my house hasn't been broken into as far as i know i can see that like there isn't a package sitting on my porch for two weeks or whatever like that's just a model of the inside of your house like an ocean's 11 spoilers right yeah
Marco:
I actually did see that one.
Marco:
It's mostly for that.
Marco:
Or, oh, look, my house is not flooded or on fire.
Marco:
That's basically what I want to know is stuff like that.
Marco:
But that's pretty much all it's good for.
Marco:
And I'm quite disappointed in the usefulness of the rest of the system and the accuracy of things like the face recognition and people recognition and everything.
Marco:
It was like...
Marco:
I probably could have gotten by with a much simpler setup, like an iPhone with like a timer that would capture a picture every day and send it up to Dropbox or something like that.
Marco:
Like that would have probably been just as useful and would have cost way less.
John:
There's other uses too.
John:
Like my wife was looking at it and she said, asked if my daughter had left her bathing suit at home, but she could see it like on the counter.
John:
Like after she, after everyone was gone and we were all at work, the kids were all at camp.
John:
I was like,
John:
did she leave her bathing suit because i see it there on the like zoom in zoom and enhance the that's the bathing suit bottom she forgot to pack it you know it's i mean i'm glad i only have one of them like and if we didn't have it for the dog i wouldn't want it because i don't like the idea of you know
John:
recording devices recording the inside of our house and uploading to the internet in general because i don't trust that you know which is why for most of the time i have it off like we have it off when we're home which seems silly it's like oh you're home upstairs to sleep don't you want to catch the cat burglars but i mean probably not like i just don't want video of the inside of my house being uploaded anywhere ever so it's mostly only on when there is nobody in the house
Marco:
Yeah, during the week that we were there before we actually left and we had these things set up, I kept the indoor ones off until we actually left.
Marco:
The outdoor ones I kept running, thinking the same thing.
Marco:
What if someone breaks into the house?
Marco:
But it's like, we've lived there for like 10 years and no one's broken into the house ever.
Marco:
My rule is if anybody ever breaks into my house, we're going to move.
Marco:
I can't live with that stress.
John:
If we're in a place where that's a real thing... That's a real thing everywhere, though.
John:
There is no place you can move except for an island, a tropical island where you're the only resident and there are no boats.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Because where are you going to go?
John:
Like, oh, we're in a high crime area.
John:
There is no, like the lowest crime area you go to is like you get richer and richer people.
John:
And those are prime targets for theft.
John:
There's not a lot of them, but they are prime targets, right?
John:
So you can't, there's no place you can go where you guarantee no one will ever break in or attempt to break into your house.
John:
And in a certain respect, as you get farther and farther away from the rest of the population and closer and closer into giant compounds that are walled off from everybody...
John:
the more tempting you are as a target and the more likely you will have a sophisticated attacker for that one robbery in your entire life rather than just a random smash and grab person but most likely you won't have that in any place because every place we all live is low crime so i wouldn't move if something happened to you you just lost the lottery in that case
John:
or won the lottery i don't know you you you had a rare event actually occur to you but it doesn't change the statistical likelihood in our in our ritzy low crime neighborhoods i mean you should look at the the crime statistics for where you live i bet they're ridiculously low as usual you're frustratingly rational but please i didn't like it when someone stole the ipod out of my car so don't do that
John:
I mean, they didn't take anything else.
John:
There's nothing else of value.
John:
I guess they could have taken my tire pressure sensor.
Marco:
I love the idea, like, what if someone does break in and steal your iPod again?
Marco:
Like, what are you going to do with that video?
Marco:
Do you think you're actually going to be able to tell who it is on the video?
John:
I mean, what I would do with the video, I would give it to the police.
John:
I mean, they wouldn't do anything with it.
John:
Right, yeah, what would they do with it?
John:
Well, mostly I want to know, look, is it teenage kids who are down the block?
John:
Because then I can go tell their parents and get them in trouble, right?
John:
Or is it just someone who I've never seen before?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Cause like, I mean, with stuff like this, you always wonder, like, you know, it looks like this is something that kids would do.
John:
Cause what kind of person successfully breaks into my car without breaking a window.
John:
And the only thing they take is a second generation iPod touch.
John:
That's a dumb kid, right?
John:
No, like a, someone who was there for thieving would have taken everything in value out of the car, at least would have opened up every compartment and pulled everything out.
John:
Like they didn't even, they didn't even get like the loose change that was in the car, like the quarters for parking meters.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Like no real car thief leaves that stuff, but a stupid teenager would.
John:
So that's basically what I'm looking for.