Hot Box With Knobs
Marco:
it feels like i haven't talked to you gentlemen for seven days it definitely hasn't been 48 hours definitely not it has been exactly seven days since we last spoke allegedly and boy there sure was a lot of news seven days ago so i think we should talk about that now uh i think that sounds like a good idea are we doing any sort of pre-show or are we just going to skip that i think that was the pre-show no son of a
Casey:
So we're going to start with some follow-up.
Casey:
And Alvy Stoddard writes in, there's an Apple support document entitled About Secure Boot, where it says, and I'm quoting, full security is the default secure boot setting, offering the highest level of security.
Casey:
And this was with regard to the T2 chip.
Casey:
The liquid metal chip that is in the iMac Pro, and it is the thing where it will only let you boot stuff that Apple signs in quasi not really at all accurate summary.
Casey:
So which one of you guys put this in here?
Casey:
Any other thoughts?
John:
Yeah, they'll just put it in there because... Are we pretending that we're recording this?
John:
Not recording this two days after the preview show?
John:
Because we didn't have a lot of follow-up, and this is a straightforward follow-up.
John:
We didn't know what the default was.
John:
Apple told us.
John:
We got a lot of follow-up seven days ago about this, and we wanted to talk about it.
John:
It's interesting that the cranked-up security is the default one, because remember, the full security setting was the one that doesn't even let you boot if you have an old version of the OS.
John:
And I'm having a hard time figuring out who...
John:
would find that behavior desirable other than people who have a bunch of Macs, other than enterprise people.
John:
And, you know, my old definition of enterprise software of like the people buying the software and other people using it.
John:
Well, an enterprise situation is where the people deciding how the computers work are picking things based on how easy it is for them to manage the computers, not based on how nice it is for the people who have to use the computers to use them.
John:
But even in an enterprise scenario,
John:
enterprise people don't want their computers automatically updating without them having extensively tested that every single piece of software on them is compatible with it so i don't know um that they apple phrases this as being like the iphone oh it's like the iphone all this you know physical security uh you know so much stronger than the old just firmware password now it's like an ios device but ios devices don't refuse to boot unless you update i mean then they're they're pretty naggy about it telling you hey there's a new update look at this red badge on your settings app but
John:
they don't you know they don't for actually force the update on you and that's not misunderstanding how the full security works but anyway when marco gets his mac pro he will be able to confirm this default and then i suppose like just wait for the first dot release of high sierra to come out and then reboot and see if it demands that you update you'll be a good guinea pig right
Marco:
Well, I think a lot of this remains to be seen, but one thing I misunderstood about it that I've seen, it seems like their language is such that they're not necessarily requiring you to have the latest.
Marco:
They say that they can prevent you from booting versions that Apple no longer trusts.
Marco:
So I think what that could mean – and this is not from PR.
Marco:
This is just from things I read on the internet.
Marco:
What that probably means is like if there's a version of the OS that is an older version that security holes were discovered in and somebody tries to like boot that maybe or install over your OS with that so they can get to your stuff, maybe that's what it's preventing, which is a legitimate security concern.
Marco:
Because I can't imagine, like, if it's actually just, like, whatever is telling it, hey, the newest version is, you know, 10.13.7 or whatever.
Marco:
First of all, what mechanism does it even learn about that from?
Marco:
That's one question.
Marco:
But if it, you know, assuming that the secure boot enclave protection unit, you know, whatever's enforcing this, assuming that doesn't like the version you're running...
Marco:
I can't imagine it would just brick your computer.
Marco:
It's probably about preventing you from rolling it back.
Marco:
It's not going to brick it.
Marco:
It's going to download the update.
Marco:
So your computer can download updates without you approving it?
John:
Yeah, like when you boot, it will download the update as part of the initial boot procedure.
John:
It's like, oh, I'm going to boot, but wait a second, I've got to do an update first.
John:
And so it'll know from the internet what the latest version is.
John:
It'll know from the internet all the information about.
John:
This is the advantage slash whatever of having a whole other CPU.
John:
That, you know, there is a boot procedure to boot up the T2 chip.
John:
And that's the thing going to the Internet, looking up all this information, downloading the software update, applying it to your computer, so on and so forth.
John:
But your idea about the fact that it's not just like it has to be the latest, but that it's only in cases where Apple says there's some version that we absolutely don't want anyone running.
John:
uh that would make more sense to me because if they do like a point release where they fix like a bug in mail or something uh you know you don't want you don't want the thing to force that update or like an update from sierra to high sierra like presumably the very last version of sierra whatever it was 10 12 6 or whatever doesn't have any terrible security flaws so it wouldn't force you to download high sierra uh when you boot it would only force you to update uh
John:
if there was some terrible security flaw in the one you had.
John:
I don't know.
John:
We'll see.
Marco:
Or rather, you'll see because you'll have this thing.
Marco:
I mean, that's the only way that I can figure that this makes sense because any other implementation of this, I think, would wreak havoc and nobody would leave it on, especially because you mentioned enterprise.
Marco:
The last thing enterprise IT managers want is their computers forcing them to update their OS without them doing it or approving it or testing it.
Marco:
That's the last thing enterprise people would want.
Marco:
So I have to imagine this is about just not letting law enforcement take your computer over and overwrite your OS with an older version that they have some tool that can hack and get your stuff.
Marco:
That's probably what this is about.
John:
But enterprise people do want you not to be able to boot their computers off an external disk.
John:
They do want you not to be able to install malware on their computers.
John:
If you're running a computer lab in a college and you have public computers...
John:
A lot of these features appeal in that scenario of sort of protecting the computer from the outside.
John:
It's just like the final straw is like, oh, and by the way, also updates may be forced on you.
John:
And that is, you know, that's a bridge too far.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't expect that this would be used to aggressively update like on day zero.
Casey:
I expect this would be to more aggressively force along the stragglers to the point that like, Marco, you're still on Sierra, not high Sierra on most of your machines.
Casey:
Is that right?
Marco:
On half of my machines.
Yeah.
Casey:
How many machines do you have?
Marco:
Oh, wait.
Marco:
No, I have the Mac Mini.
Marco:
Most of my machines.
Marco:
I always forget about the Mac Mini because it's just like a headless server.
Marco:
Wait, the Mac Mini still exists?
Casey:
Does it still work?
Casey:
Actually, at this point, if you had Secure Boot, it would probably refuse to start up because of its age.
Casey:
Anyway, I bring this up to say... Maybe it would only run out a third of its performance because it happened to change the battery.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Can we not talk about that?
Marco:
We're definitely talking about that.
Marco:
That was a huge deal seven days ago.
Casey:
It was a huge deal like two or three weeks ago, and everyone has been begging us to talk about it, and I really have no interest in it, but we'll talk about it.
Casey:
Anyway, the point is, I think at this point, a couple of months on, this may be the time when a secure boot thing may start to compel you, or I guess I was going to say try, but I guess it would compel you to upgrade to High Sierra.
Casey:
But personally, I can't imagine if I were to get an iMac Pro,
Casey:
Or, you know, whatever computers come with this in the future.
Casey:
I don't think I would turn this from anything but full security.
Casey:
Like I update not day zero or day one, if you will, but I update reasonably quickly.
Casey:
And I don't think that personally I would have any reason to crank this down.
Casey:
And it sounds like the two of you guys would.
Casey:
Marco, is that what you're saying?
Casey:
That you would not want to run at full security?
Marco:
It depends.
Marco:
So I'm going to have to do some research over the next negative three to six days, but it has to be something more like preventing you from overriding the OS with an old hacked version.
Marco:
It has to be.
Marco:
I can't imagine it's...
Marco:
I can't imagine it's going to like, I'm going to wake up my computer one day and it's going to say, nope, sorry, you can't run Sierra anymore.
Marco:
I don't think that's going to be what they do because, again, that would just wreak havoc with so many big installations and people's needs and everything.
Marco:
I can't imagine.
Marco:
So I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt and leave it on the default, which is the full security.
Marco:
And if I'm proven wrong in my research three to six days ago, then maybe I'll change my mind.
John:
i'm trying to look up if i deleted from the show notes the screenshot that cable had posted but my recollection of it is that it is different than the screenshot that it's on the apple support document that we'll put in the show notes and the the wording underneath what full security means from cable screenshot it was full security ensures that only the latest and most secure software can be run
John:
Right.
John:
It requires a network connection in software installation.
John:
Right.
John:
So that's the old wording.
John:
Oh, you know, only the latest and most secure software latest and most secure.
John:
I mean, is that just saying like the latest is always the most secure, but latest is pretty unambiguous.
John:
New text on Apple's page ensures that only your current OS or signed operating system software currently trusted by Apple can run.
John:
And that is very different.
John:
Very, very different.
John:
So only your current OS, meaning whatever is currently on your system, or signed operating system software currently trusted by Apple.
John:
And that's more like what Marco was talking about.
John:
Currently trusted by Apple is Apple could say, okay, we put out a bump point release that is no longer trusted.
John:
So that particular one can't run.
John:
But any of these other 20 versions are all fine.
John:
So maybe Apple is changing its mind.
John:
I mean, I guess I would assume the one on the Apple site is the most up to date one.
John:
And I would assume that the text changes reflect the reality of the feature.
John:
But, you know, as we said, Marco will find out for us, I guess.
Casey:
And I'd also like to reiterate what what, John, you had said a little while ago about any sort of larger organization wanting complete and utter control over their machines.
Casey:
At my work, which is a 500-employee company, I was put on the blessed list that I could install High Sierra, but by default, you are not allowed to install High Sierra.
Casey:
And my work is actually fairly hands-off with our machines.
Casey:
By default, average users do not get administrator privileges, but all developers do.
Casey:
And they're generally not too bad about giving us reasonably full access to our computers.
Casey:
And yet, despite that, we are not allowed to install upgrades of operating systems without them having blessed them and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And so they're kind of sort of beta testing with a group of, I don't know, 10 or 20 of us internally, of which I'm part of that.
Casey:
But a friend of mine was...
Casey:
works at a very, very large financial organization.
Casey:
And I've heard through this friend that their computer pretty much is inoperable.
Casey:
Their MacBook Pro is pretty much inoperable unless they are connected to the company's VPN or the company's Wi-Fi.
Casey:
That's how stodgy these sorts of larger companies, especially in financial services, can get over time is that this person's computer, they basically can't get to anything on the Internet, even on their home Wi-Fi until they've connected to Big Brother.
Casey:
I mean to the company's VPN so that they can be monitored.
Casey:
I mean tracked.
Casey:
I mean just taken care of.
Casey:
It's crazy out there, I tell you.
Casey:
Anyway, William Pierce writes in, there's a lot of women car journalists these days, but one blog that sprung to mind is at blackflag.jalopnik.com.
Casey:
And it's by Steph Schrader and Alex King.
Casey:
It's a great place for racing news, solid coverage, and they've gotten plenty of scoops.
Casey:
I have not had the chance to check this out.
Casey:
I've been pretty much off the internet all day.
Casey:
I'm assuming one of the two of you did, probably, John.
John:
Yeah, this was a but we had an ask ATP question about, you know, car magazines for someone's kid.
John:
And I went into how a lot of the car magazines are written, assuming that everyone who's reading it is a dude.
John:
And.
John:
You know, and how it's not really a great thing to introduce young readers to if you want them to avoid perpetuating, you know, sort of behavior that excludes people or whatever.
John:
But the question was specifically about magazines, and I'm assuming the person meant paper magazines, because when I see magazines, that's what I think.
John:
But William brings up a good point.
John:
If you want to look for a more modern, inclusive take on whatever your hobby may be, online is probably the place to do it.
John:
And I do read some car sites.
John:
I watch more YouTube videos than I read car sites, but I certainly go to Jalopnik a lot, mostly led there by other people that I follow linking to cool car stories on Jalopnik.
John:
And so, yeah, they have blogs and journalists.
John:
And if you're looking for
John:
Depends on what kind of news you're looking for.
John:
I looked at this thing, and it's a lot of racing news, and I'm really not into racing.
John:
But that's probably a better bet for finding new voices, as they say, in the automotive news industry.
Marco:
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Casey:
Let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
Scott Lauheed writes in, what do you think the odds are of attention detection on Apple Watch?
Casey:
It could really refine raise to wake.
Casey:
Display remains on as long as you're looking at it, turns on with attention, etc.
Casey:
So quick recap on the iPhone.
Casey:
Don't call it X.
Casey:
There is a feature by which if it realizes that you're not actively looking at the phone because it's using the front-facing camera array, if you're not looking at the phone, it will dim itself reasonably quickly.
Casey:
And if it's dimmed but still on, it will actually...
Casey:
turn itself to full brightness again once it realizes you've looked at it again.
Casey:
And it's actually extremely cool.
Casey:
And so Scott's thought was, hey, could we use that same tech in the Apple Watch?
Casey:
So as you're looking at the Apple Watch, then it will continue to be full brightness.
Casey:
It won't ever turn itself off until it knows that you're no longer looking at it, in which case, obviously, it can turn itself back down or off or et cetera.
Casey:
To my eyes, I do think that this will, on an infinite timescale, be a thing, but I don't see it happening anytime soon.
Casey:
Because even though they've taken what was effectively a Microsoft Kinect and shrank it down to be in the notch in the iPhone X, I don't see it becoming small enough to be on the Apple Watch anytime soon, much less having the battery power to power it.
Casey:
But that's just me.
Casey:
Marco, what do you think?
Marco:
Yeah, I don't think it makes a lot of sense, honestly, because for all the reasons you said, I can't imagine it would have the battery power to be constantly scanning to see if you're looking at it or not.
Marco:
And also, for the feature of things like keeping the screen on for a while, if you are looking at it, again, it doesn't seem like it's worth the power.
Marco:
It doesn't seem like they have the physical space to put the sensors on the front of it.
Marco:
I don't think they intend for you to be looking at the watch without touching it for very long anyway.
John:
all right john any other thoughts uh if they had the battery power to do the face detection to power all the cameras and have them do all the things uh they should spend that battery power on having a watch face that never turns off i know it's probably different amounts but like that's the goal i think that's a better goal like to basically get to the point where the watch face never turns off using using whatever better technology better screens whatever they have to do that's what you want and so this in-between thing where you burn a lot of battery energy and
John:
Trying to be super smart about when you turn the screen on and off seems like a bad tradeoff to me.
Casey:
Moving on, Max Velasco Knott writes in, I'm in the market for a RAID 0 external SSD storage.
Casey:
I'm wondering what you use and what you'd recommend.
Casey:
I'm on a Thunderbolt 2 machine, but I'm open to a backwards compatible Thunderbolt 3 drive if you happen to be using one.
Casey:
Thank you for any advice.
Casey:
I have precisely zero input on this, so Marco, take it away.
Marco:
As mentioned, seven days ago, TIFF's iMac has had a four-drive RAID 0 SSD Thunderbolt 2 enclosure for the last few years.
Marco:
So I have direct experience with these.
Marco:
They're fine.
Marco:
They're nothing special.
Marco:
They tend to come with really loud, crappy fans.
Marco:
I replaced the fan in hers with a much quieter Noctua super quiet fan, and that was a very, very good upgrade to do to it.
Marco:
That didn't seem to reduce the life of anything at all because...
Marco:
It's really just cooling the very, very hot Thunderbolt chip that's inside.
Marco:
SSDs don't need much cooling themselves.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
We've never had any problems with it, like disconnecting or failing or anything like that.
Marco:
But it is a fairly expensive solution.
Marco:
A much better solution.
Marco:
I don't know what Max's needs are here, but...
Marco:
If you can at all avoid having an external RAID enclosure, you'll be better off for it.
Marco:
If you can either just get one big disk of some sort, or if you can use network storage, like a NAS or something like that, that's...
Marco:
generally better.
Marco:
It's just less hassle and less crap and less hardware to break and maintain.
Marco:
But if you still want to do this, the enclosure we got was from OWC, MaxSales.com.
Marco:
I think it was a few hundred dollars maybe just for the enclosure.
Marco:
Anything involving multiple disk enclosures with a Thunderbolt interface is not going to be cheap.
Marco:
Another option that you have is to use the built-in software RAID in macOS.
Marco:
I don't think that applies to APFS yet, but is that right, John?
Marco:
Do you know?
Marco:
What?
John:
Do you want to know if you can do software RAID at all with APFS?
John:
Yeah.
John:
I don't remember.
John:
I remember I have the same vague memory as you do that there was a bunch of limitations.
John:
I think they might have taken it away with APFS, but I'm not sure.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Anyway, so if you can do software raid still with whatever your file system needs are, another option you have if the performance of this won't be too bad is to just get a bunch of really inexpensive USB 3 enclosures.
Marco:
Because you can get a USB 3 SSD enclosure for like $15.
Marco:
I have a few of these from my own computer.
Marco:
Bus powered.
Marco:
That's the important part.
Marco:
Bus powered.
Marco:
Yes, and bus powered.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Because SSDs don't need external power.
Marco:
So that way you avoid having not only additional cable clutter, but also if you can eliminate some device's own power supply from your setup, you eliminate a major source of failure and weirdness.
Marco:
Because those little power bricks that come with everything are terrible.
Marco:
They just aren't very reliable.
Marco:
They fail all the time.
Marco:
Not to mention that they're big and bulky and ugly.
Marco:
So anything that can be bus powered is generally a gain for you here.
Marco:
And because you're powering SSDs and not big spinning disks, you should be able to get away with that.
Marco:
So if you can get away with just a handful of cheap USB enclosures, if that will work for your performance and throughput needs, that will be way cheaper and just a simpler setup in general.
Marco:
But again, it all depends on what you need.
Marco:
If you do still truly need an external RAID 0 enclosure, I've had totally fine luck with the OWC.
Marco:
I think it's called the Thunder Bay Mini or something like that.
Marco:
It's the one that holds specifically for two and a half inch drives.
Marco:
It holds four of them.
Marco:
It's Thunderbolt from OWC and it has a very loud fan until you put an Octua fan in there.
Casey:
Joshua Rogers writes, do any of you use any soundproofing or acoustic material in the room that you podcast in to help with audio recording quality?
Casey:
I will start.
Casey:
I used to, before I moved rooms on account of our forthcoming kid, I used to use literally a fleece blanket that I push pinned into the wall behind my iMac.
Casey:
And that was enough sound deadening to get the job done.
Casey:
Marco had told me very early on that I was echoing quite a bit.
Casey:
And this was probably during the neutral time, in fact.
Casey:
And something in like 2013 or thereabouts, I push pinned this blanket to the wall and it stayed up for about four years until we moved rooms.
Casey:
Now we have some sort of soundproofing something or other that I think, Marco, you might have recommended that I'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
Soundtracks Pro?
Casey:
Maybe.
Casey:
I'll have to look through my Amazon order history.
Marco:
If it has the cool like swirly pattern, it's Soundtracks Pro.
Casey:
No, definitely not.
Casey:
I probably got something considerably cheaper knowing me.
Casey:
So I will put links to both of these things into the show notes.
Casey:
And basically, I have a panel of nine of these.
Casey:
So let me back up a half step.
Casey:
So my iMac and my desk is in between two windows.
Casey:
Above the iMac is a panel of nine, I don't know, foot long by foot wide sound deadening things.
Casey:
And so there's basically the wall behind my iMac is all sound deadening material.
Casey:
There's nothing on the opposite wall because it's far enough away.
Casey:
Not that this room is that big, but it's far enough away that I don't think it really matters.
John:
I wanted a link to the thumbtacks that you used that kept a fleece blanket on your wall for four years, because I'm just thinking of the idea of, I've got a fleece blanket that I want to hold on the wall.
John:
You know what I'll use?
John:
I'll use thumbtacks.
John:
Or as Casey would say, pushpins.
John:
I'll use thumbtacks to put it on the wall.
John:
I would think within five minutes that thing would fall down.
John:
Did you use a hundred of them, or are these the world's best thumbtacks?
Casey:
No, it was not a terribly heavy nor thick fleece blanket.
Casey:
I'm sure I have a picture somewhere of it, but I don't know if I could dig it up easily.
Casey:
But it was not a very heavy blanket by any means.
Casey:
It was fairly thin.
John:
Do you feel like it made a difference?
Casey:
Well, Marco, I mean this in the most respectful way possible.
Casey:
Marco complained and moaned about my echoes, and then I put that up, and then he stopped complaining and moaning about my echoes.
Casey:
So either he figured out a way around it or it was better.
Marco:
That's how I show my approval.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
When Marco stops complaining, you know he's happy.
Casey:
But anyway, Marco, tell me again what you have.
Casey:
You have Soundtrex?
Casey:
Soundtrex?
Marco:
Soundtrex, T-R-A-X, Pro.
Marco:
You can get them on Amazon.
Marco:
You get a decent-sized pack for $40 or $50 with, I think, eight one-by-four-foot sections, something like that.
Marco:
They also make larger ones.
Marco:
If you want to do like a big wall, you can get larger panels that are about two by five or two by four feet.
Marco:
I have a few of those behind my computer.
Marco:
Yeah, so this is the kind of thing.
Marco:
So it does help to treat the room with soft things to make you sound better.
Marco:
A lot of times people go a little overboard with it and they just kind of keep going because they think they need it or it just looks cool.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It makes you look like a really professional podcaster to have sound editing material in your entire office.
Marco:
But usually you don't need as much of it as people use.
Marco:
And also, there's lots of alternatives that will work just as well.
Marco:
Your hanging a blanket on the wall was totally fine because what you basically need is for the room to be filled with as many soft things as possible that can avoid echoes.
Marco:
That's what you're trying to avoid here.
Marco:
You're not trying to...
Marco:
insulate like sound insulation to like make the room soundproof so that people outside the room can't hear you and that outside sounds can't get in that's not what this is that's a different thing and that's and you don't do that for 50 bucks all we're doing here is trying to reduce the echoes of sound bouncing around hard surfaces of the room
Marco:
And so some places just don't need this.
Marco:
Like one of the reasons why like sometimes we joke like when podcasters have to record like in our closets for some reason.
Marco:
It sounds great because closets are small spaces filled with soft clothing.
Marco:
So there's like there's no echoes that can be had.
Marco:
If you think about the opposite, the worst place you could record would be in a bathroom with a hard floor and tile walls everywhere.
Marco:
Especially if you ever moved out of an apartment and you've already packed up the shower curtain and all your towels from the bathroom so it's just totally empty.
Marco:
You notice how incredibly echoey it is with no soft things in there.
Marco:
So we're going for the opposite of that.
Marco:
You generally just want soft things in the room.
Marco:
That doesn't have to be sound editing material.
Marco:
A rug helps tremendously.
Marco:
And just having blankets around.
Marco:
If you have a giant open hard floor, put a blanket or a rug on it while you record.
Marco:
But the best thing you can do is, as Casey mentioned with the blanket...
Marco:
The best place to put something soft is on whatever wall or whatever else is behind the microphone.
Marco:
Because if you think about how you talk towards a microphone, the first place that you're going to get those echoes is they're going to be bouncing off the wall behind the mic.
Marco:
Your sound's going to go past the mic, bounce off the wall behind it, and then get fed back into the mic as an echo from the back or from the sides or whatever else.
Marco:
Anything you can do to minimize sound echoing from right behind the mic, you will see a large result from that.
Marco:
It can be sound-absorbed material.
Marco:
If you're looking for something, you know, more like a permanent kind of setup that you can hang up and just leave there for years and be done with it, yeah, go for some kind of acoustic foam.
Marco:
And honestly, it doesn't really matter which acoustic foam you get.
Marco:
They're not very different.
Marco:
All you're looking for is like soft, squishy material to absorb the echoes.
Marco:
I like the Soundtracks Pro because it looks cool.
Marco:
It has this nice little like swirly kind of hexagon-like pattern.
Marco:
So that's kind of fun, but, you know, it doesn't really matter.
Marco:
You can get pretty much anything at pretty much any price, and it'll work about the same.
Marco:
A second thing that you should consider if this is a problem for you, consider using a different microphone.
Marco:
A lot of microphones that come highly recommended on like gear guides and stuff and how to podcast and even come recommended from podcasters who just don't have a lot of experience with other microphones, a lot of them are inexpensive, large diaphragm cardioid condensers.
Marco:
This includes things like the Blue Yeti and a whole lot of entry-level microphones.
Marco:
Basically, if it's a condenser and you spent less than $200 for it, it's probably one of these.
Marco:
The problem with these, they do sound very nice and crisp, and they pick up a lot of detail in your voice, but they also pick up, like, if a pin drops in the room.
Marco:
Like, they'll pick up any background noise.
Marco:
And as a result, they also very, very easily pick up echo from the walls.
Marco:
If you just use a mic with a different pickup pattern, some people say you have to use a dynamic mic.
Marco:
This is not actually the case.
Marco:
You have to use a super cardioid mic.
Marco:
That's what you actually want.
Marco:
It can be a condenser or dynamic.
Marco:
It should be super cardioid or hyper cardioid.
Marco:
What you're looking at, and I did a whole review.
Marco:
You can listen to audio samples.
Marco:
What you're looking at basically is the Shure Beta 87A.
Marco:
That's what you're looking at.
Marco:
It is about $250.
Marco:
It's an XLR mic, not a USB mic.
Marco:
I don't know of any...
Marco:
USB super cardioid podcast microphones.
Marco:
If anyone knows of any, please let me know.
Marco:
But what this does, the super cardioid pickup pattern, it basically tightens and narrows the area from which it picks up sound.
Marco:
So it will pick up a lot less sound coming from different directions and coming from further away from the mic.
Marco:
which in turn will kind of inherently reduce the amount of echo it picks up.
Marco:
It's also really nice that it'll reduce the amount of background noise it picks up.
Marco:
Like if somebody breaks a plate in the next room over, you will hear a much quieter version of it than you would on a different pickup pattern because the sound drops off further the more you go away from the mic.
Marco:
So anything you can do to narrow that pickup pattern, that will serve you very well in the mic.
Marco:
And then you won't need to do as much babying of the room.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, it's really weird.
Casey:
I was using a Rode Podcaster for, I don't know, something like the first year that I was doing this with you two fine gentlemen.
Casey:
And then I am now using, what do I have?
Casey:
I don't have the 87A.
Casey:
I have the 58A.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
I don't even remember.
Marco:
You should switch to the 87A, by the way.
Marco:
Yeah, well, I'm sure I could do it at some point.
Marco:
You sound good enough that I don't bother you about it.
Yeah.
Casey:
and that's the marco seal of approval but it really is it really is it really is tremendous the difference because right now you know my my mouth is within an inch of the pop filter not the pop filter but the foam on the edge of the microphone and if i if i were to turn my mouth and maybe do something like 90 degrees the other direction it is tremendous the difference that that makes and if i go you know 180 degrees the other direction you
Marco:
can barely even hear me it's it's really crazy what what a super cardioid super cardioid yeah and that's what you're using yeah the beta 58a is is a super cardioid dynamic mic it is it is very good for it's very good for the price um it's it has a little it's a little bit like boomy and fat in like the mid-bass frequency area yeah it is i mean what
Marco:
But for the price, it's pretty good.
Marco:
But I do recommend if you have a setup that can take an XLR mic and you can spend whatever that is, like $160 for that, save up another $80 and get the 87A instead.
Marco:
It's better.
Casey:
Yeah, this is 160.
Casey:
You're right.
Casey:
And if you say the 87A is 60 more than Soviet.
Casey:
John, what is your situation with regard to sound deadening material?
Marco:
John does not count.
Marco:
John has an inexpensive large diaphragm condenser microphone.
Marco:
It was like 300, 350 bucks or something, wasn't it?
Marco:
uh no well you probably i think the the most it ever cost was 250 but still um yeah you have the pg the shure pg42 usb it's it's sounds incredible it sounds very very good but it is an incredibly picky microphone for room dynamics because it's what i mentioned earlier it's the kind that picks up like a needle dropping like it picks up anything however
Marco:
All the rules of this microphone cease to apply in John Syracuse's office, and I don't know why, and I've never wanted to tell him to change anything, because for some reason that I cannot fathom or figure out, he sounds perfect all the time.
Marco:
He does not have any echo.
Marco:
There's never any noise or hiss on the track.
Marco:
All the problems that you would usually get with this type of condenser...
Marco:
I bought that exact microphone to try in my mega review and it was incredibly picky for me.
Marco:
But for some reason, it's perfect for John.
Marco:
So I don't like the rules do not apply in John's office.
Marco:
Well, some rules do.
John:
I mean, so for the sound editing material for getting to this question.
John:
The main reason I don't have sound deadening material is back when we were all buying sound foam and stuff, of course, Marco bought the swirly one that he was just telling you about.
John:
And I went, I'm like, oh, I should get that same swirly stuff Marco got.
John:
And I went to the webpage where they sell it and it was $60.
John:
And my interpretation was it's $60 for one rectangle of the foamy stuff.
John:
And then I looked at how many rectangles Marco has on his wall, and I'm like, well, Marco, you know, all right, fine.
John:
But no way in hell I'm spending $60 times, you know, 12 to put foam on my wall.
John:
And I'm like, this is ridiculous.
John:
And I did some brief searching for cheaper foam, but I was just like, yeah, I'm just not going to do it.
John:
So anyway...
John:
Now that I know that it is not $60 for one square, it's $60 for what?
John:
How many is it?
John:
I think $6 or $12.
Marco:
It's enough.
Marco:
The $60 pack of the 1x2 sheets, whatever that is, that's enough for pretty much anybody to make their setup sound great.
John:
yeah so that sounds more reasonable although it really annoys me that the that the pattern doesn't line up if you buy all the squares that really annoys me that's yeah and and so i have some of the big ones as i mentioned it doesn't line up on them either but at least with the big ones you have fewer seams yeah so anyway uh but i don't i still don't have the phone and also i want to ask marco how he attached it to his wall and he's like i permanently stuck it on there and if i ever want to remove it i have to repaint the wall and i was like
Marco:
yeah like there's like there's like adhesive squares that that they recommend that you use with it and i just i got those so each one of them is stuck on with something like six of like little like two by one inch adhesive square things like double-sided tape kind of things um and yeah i'm pretty sure and they haven't fallen off at all which is great but i'm pretty sure that's that's a pretty permanent installation for the wall you should have used uh casey's thumbtacks
Casey:
Well, it's funny you bring that up.
Casey:
We tried to use command strips on the foam that we have, and they have all fallen over time.
Casey:
But I think if memory serves, I did get the adhesive squares that Marco recommended, and then we put those on the back of the foam and then command stripped those.
Casey:
Does that make sense?
Casey:
So it's foam, adhesive squares, command strips, and that actually seems to be holding pretty well so far.
John:
yeah that's a good idea um you can put it right over the thumbtack holes if you have them um but but anyway uh as for as for my room uh early on in this series someone i forget who it was marco do you remember which one of the helpful audio people i'm about to talk about i believe it was marcus de paulo yes there you go that's probably it um sent us a bunch of advice about what we're doing and what he had to say about my mic was that he heard a lot of echo and he surmised that i had my monitor really close to my microphone and he was right
John:
and so the only thing i've done to make this room better for audio when i'm podcasting is i move my monitor farther away from my microphone or my microphone farther away from my monitor i still think the echo is there it's just the delay is slightly different um the thing i think that's good about this room is uh like to my right is a giant bookshelf and bookshelves are surprisingly good baffles for sound because of all the little knobbly books you know and the little gaps between them and behind them and
John:
even even my bookshelves where every spine is meticulously lined up uh it helps if the spines are if the spines are uneven i bet it works even better this room is carpeted which also helps um and the windows do have blinds on them which are also kind of knobbly um but yeah it's nothing and and the gain is really low on my mic and i have like tons of uh i have a double pop filter and a foam shield on it so
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'm dreading changing my setup, but I think I will eventually when I get my new computer in 20 mumble mumble.
John:
I'm going to have to because... The new one has USB.
John:
Marco's recommended mic and Marco's recommended little hot box with knobs for my brand new computer and then I'll just... Hot box with knobs.
John:
That's what I call those, like, you can spend $750 for a hotbox with knobs.
Marco:
Yeah, it's actually up to like $900 now.
Marco:
The one I like is the USB Pre 2 from sound devices.
Marco:
So this is the box that converts USB to microphones.
Marco:
I've tried a lot of these things.
Marco:
There's lots of them that are totally fine for like $150.
Marco:
um but i wanted something that was better than totally fine i wanted something that was great and sound devices usb pre 2 is great it's the kind of thing that if you've ever had a problem or bad performance with one of the 150 dollar ones and you just get fed up and you're like can i just throw money at this problem to make it go away this is the answer to that to that question uh and the reason you should get it john is that it has amazing knobs like all the other ones have cheap but i'm not supposed to ever touch the knobs
Marco:
No, well, you got to touch them, you know, a couple of times to set it up.
John:
And trust me, never move them again.
Marco:
You feel any other microphone interfaces, knobs, and you're going to be like, oh, God, my toaster is better than this.
Marco:
You try these knobs and you're like, oh, my God, I want these knobs on everything I own.
Marco:
They're so much better.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
I love you guys.
John:
Anyway, I may eventually get something new.
John:
But we'll see.
John:
But that's it.
John:
No foam.
Casey:
I love you guys so much.
Casey:
What is this show about?
Casey:
Knobfeel.
Casey:
That's what this show is about.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
So for the last few weeks, we've had a reasonably significant amount of people tell us in various states of anger that we need to take Apple to task about how iPhones are throttling CPU performance when the batteries get old and how this is horse crap.
Casey:
And we really need to beat Apple up because apparently they think that people who matter listen to the show.
Casey:
And guess what?
Casey:
They don't.
Casey:
But anyway, they do.
Casey:
Point is, people were really upset about this.
Casey:
And this has been going on for probably about a month now or nearabouts.
Casey:
And I never found this to be a particularly interesting thing to talk about, a particularly interesting topic.
Casey:
Because, I mean, hey, guess what?
Casey:
As your phones get old, they're going to get slow.
Casey:
I mean, I understand that that's...
Casey:
probably shouldn't happen that a cpu is a cpu is a cpu but i mean hey as stuff gets older it gets worse as i get older i get worse and so it stands to reason as other things get older maybe they will get worse too but there's been a whole bunch of activity about this not today but seven days ago exactly wherein we actually got some information from apple so
Casey:
I'm going to try to do my chief summarizer in chief and you guys jump in and or, you know, correct me after the fact.
Casey:
And what it sounds like is, and I experienced this with my six or maybe it was my success.
Casey:
As my six or success got older, occasionally it would go from something like 20 or 30 percent charge as reported by the iPhone to dead.
Casey:
It just turned itself off.
Casey:
And this was deeply infuriating because here it is.
Casey:
I'm trying to perform some sort of task.
Casey:
And my battery says that it's at something like a third charge.
Casey:
I don't use battery percentage or I didn't use battery percentage percentage before the iPhone 10 because I'm not a monster.
Casey:
And so anyway, I just make a lot of friends with this segment.
Casey:
Oh, I know.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
But regardless, well, I already made friends with my Fahrenheit discussion.
Casey:
So, you know what?
Casey:
Why not?
Casey:
Sorry, I'm not sorry.
Casey:
But anyway, the point is that, you know, I look at the little the little icon and it says it's about a third full.
Casey:
I go to perform some sort of operation.
Casey:
Suddenly the phone turns off.
Casey:
So then I turn it back on.
Casey:
Suddenly it's back at a third battery.
Casey:
And that seems really, really weird.
Casey:
Well, what it sounds like was happening was that when the CPU or other components were really, really asked to do a lot, it would cause enough draw on the battery that the battery would end up kind of just not failing, but just going kaput.
Casey:
And so the phone would turn off and that would be that.
Casey:
And so what Apple's decided to do is as the battery gets older and as they realize that the battery can't really handle this anymore, they will start throttling the CPU.
Casey:
And so they'll not let the CPU operate at 100% speed in order to prevent these sorts of things from happening, which to my eyes is a perfectly reasonable engineering solution to a problem.
Casey:
And this problem is that batteries, as they get older...
Casey:
They get crumbier.
Casey:
That's the way batteries work.
Casey:
It may not be the way CPUs work, but it is the way batteries work.
Casey:
And so, to my eyes, that's perfectly fine.
Casey:
I don't see why everyone has gotten up in arms about this.
Casey:
But, oh man, a lot of people are...
Casey:
really angry about this.
Casey:
And I think part of that is probably because as you upgrade to the latest versions of iOS and as you have operating systems that are more and more taxing on the CPU, it ends up causing a system-wide slowdown.
Casey:
So
Casey:
Not having experienced that because I've gone on the complete, you know, douchebag, I get a new iPhone every year train.
Casey:
But I was not always on this train.
Casey:
And I do remember times when my older phones got a little bit slow over time.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
I think the moral of the story is these devices, or certainly the latest versions of iOS, aren't really designed to use two-plus-year-old phones, maybe three- or four-year-old phones.
Casey:
And maybe the thing that we should all be up in arms about is why is iOS 11 being supported all the way back to the iPhone 4 or whatever?
Casey:
That's probably not accurate, but just for the sake of conversation.
Casey:
And that's, to me...
Casey:
The thing that maybe is a little bit more controversial, but the fact that the CPU is being slowed down, like, hey, this is making it so your phone doesn't spontaneously die.
Casey:
But OK, fine.
Casey:
If you prefer that, go ahead.
Casey:
Maybe that's what we should do.
Casey:
And I think.
Casey:
I think it was either Panzerino or Gruber that said – I think it was Panzerino that said, hey, the issue here is really communication, that Apple never told anyone why this was happening.
Casey:
And if they just disclosed, hey, we've realized that these spikes in battery draw have caused the batteries to temporarily fail – fail probably isn't the right word, but give up –
Casey:
That's why we've throttled your CPUs is to prevent that problem.
Casey:
And if they had said that up front, then I think this wouldn't be an issue.
Casey:
But they didn't.
Casey:
And so here we are.
Casey:
So that is not a very succinct summary, but that is the summary nevertheless.
Casey:
And I apologize.
Casey:
But Marco, tell me about this.
Casey:
What do you think?
Marco:
So this is – it seems like this is a very well-intentioned solution to a very real problem.
Marco:
I agree.
Marco:
But because of the context that is complicated and hard to get rid of, which I'll get to in a second.
Marco:
So because of the context and because of the execution details of this –
Marco:
I think it's a really big problem for them.
Marco:
So the context is probably the most important part here, that we've known, you know, anybody who is an Apple fan or Apple defender in any way ever, and Apple frequently needs defense, because people out there have a lot of horrible misconceptions about Apple, and they have forever, right?
Marco:
And I think this is part of why Apple fans are so defensive so much of the time, because there's so much bad information out there about Apple, and people are always having to fight it or correct it.
Marco:
One of the things that a large portion of the population who buys iPhones believes is that Apple intentionally makes their phones slower with every new software update to make them buy new phones.
Marco:
And there is some truth in this, not in the intentionality of it, but there is some truth that new OSs do usually run slower on old hardware than the ones that they shipped with.
Marco:
I don't think Apple's doing any of that intentionally.
Marco:
I think, as John Gruber wrote today, I think Apple employees would just quit before they would do something as crazy and fraudulent and evil as that.
Marco:
But the fact is, the new OSs do usually run worse on the old hardware than what shipped with them.
Marco:
And that's just because they're new OSs.
Marco:
There's new animations and higher memory usage and more stuff happening in the background because it seems like these are designed to run really well on the current generation and making them run on previous generations is...
Marco:
It doesn't seem like it's a very high priority to make that smooth or awesome.
Marco:
Honestly, I don't know.
Marco:
Maybe it is.
Marco:
Maybe there's tons of people working on that.
Marco:
But the results that people see usually is that when they update their two-year-old phone to the newest OS that comes out every fall, it's slower and it gets worse battery life.
Marco:
Now, there's lots of complicating factors to this that make this partially true, partially not true, partially inevitable, the behavior of lithium-ion batteries over time, the progress of software over time.
Marco:
But the fact is there is this very widespread belief that this is planned obsolescence, that Apple is forcing people's phones to be slower over time so that people go out and buy new phones.
Marco:
So that is the context in which this story now comes out.
Marco:
Now, Apple has been doing this for almost a year.
Marco:
And even if pens are going to link to an article he wrote last February, like almost a year ago, saying like Apple said this about this new update and here's what it does.
Marco:
Because there was a big problem back then about iPhone 6 and 6X, I believe.
Marco:
As you mentioned, doing the whole unexpected shutdown thing when they were getting a little bit old.
Marco:
What has come out over the last few days, as you mentioned, there was a Reddit post that kicked it all off.
Marco:
We'll link to it in the show notes.
Marco:
Where somebody basically said that he ran Geekbench, which is a popular benchmark, before getting his battery replaced.
Marco:
And then he got his battery replaced by Apple and ran Geekbench again.
Marco:
And that his CPU performance before the battery replacement was like half of what it was after.
Marco:
So he made this Reddit post saying like, hey, it looks like Apple is throttling CPU performance when your battery is old.
Marco:
And it took a while before, like everyone was getting all up in arms for a few days.
Marco:
And then about nine days ago,
Marco:
Is it John Poole, the guy's name at Geekbench?
Marco:
I believe it's John Poole.
Marco:
The developer of Geekbench went through all the data and found trends and peaks of all the iPhone 6s and 6s and 7s that are running Geekbench before and after the software update that added this behavior and their different performances in the aggregate.
Marco:
And there were very, very clear peaks.
Marco:
Before the update, there was a clear peak where it's supposed to be.
Marco:
And then after the update, there was still that main peak where it's supposed to be, but then there were like three other peaks at lower levels at about even intervals.
Marco:
It's subtracting 20%, 20%, 20%.
Marco:
There were clear peaks there that like, okay, there's clearly a lot of phones that are benchmarking in these levels here.
Yeah.
Marco:
And that came out about nine days ago, and then exactly seven days ago, Apple issued a press statement basically saying, look, here's what we do.
Marco:
This is to combat lithium-ion battery problems over time when they get older, and they can't maintain the highest peak output when the CPU is drawing the most energy.
Marco:
And so we throttled down those peaks only when necessary to keep the phone running, basically, to prevent it from shutting down.
Marco:
So they basically just did and then confirmed that they did something that slows down your phone when it gets older.
Marco:
And I know they had, like, I'm sure they had the best of intentions.
Marco:
It's clear from their statement, you know, I believe them.
Marco:
I believe this is why they did it.
Marco:
I don't think they're trying to push new phones even harder.
Marco:
I think the iPhone sell themselves.
Marco:
Like, I don't think they need to break your old phone to sell new ones on a regular basis.
Marco:
But I do think this was done very poorly.
Marco:
Even if this is the right thing to do, the right way to do it is to tell the user...
Marco:
And I said on Twitter earlier, like, this should be a setting and you should tell the user.
Marco:
I have since come around.
Marco:
I don't think it needs necessarily be a setting because, as somebody pointed out, like, if you turn the setting off, your phone just randomly dies all day.
Marco:
Like, that's not great.
Marco:
So maybe it doesn't need to be a setting.
Marco:
But it absolutely needs to be communicated to the user.
Marco:
These phones are people's primary computers.
Marco:
You can't slow down people's primary computers by seemingly 20% to 50% for a reason that you don't tell them about and that they have no way to know unless they run a benchmark.
Marco:
All they know is my phone is really slow and maybe it's just because it's old, I guess.
Marco:
Maybe I have to get a new one and a new phone is a lot of money and a battery replacement is not.
Marco:
So for a lot of people, they could just get battery replacement.
Marco:
If they knew that their phone would be way less slow if they just got a battery replacement for $20 to $70, a lot of people would choose that option and save their money, and maybe that'll help them out.
Marco:
And to not tell them, to slow it down for reasons that are not apparent to the user and are never told to the user, no matter what Apple says the reason is, the users don't know that or don't believe them.
Marco:
So this narrative that we have been battling for years, that Apple is intentionally slowing down phones with each OS update to make you buy a new one, and we've been saying, no, no, no, they wouldn't do that, they don't do that.
Marco:
They actually just did that.
Marco:
Not to make you buy a new one, but they are now slowing down old phones with a new software update.
Marco:
And even though their justifications are good, that is not how it looks to the people who it's happening to.
Marco:
And now, like, this is not a small thing.
Marco:
We've talked before about how certain tech myths get embedded in people.
Marco:
We've talked about things like how, oh, you should quit all your apps to save your battery.
Marco:
Those things get embedded and are very, very hard to ever remove.
Marco:
Windows people probably still are defragging their hard drives.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It's like, this is the kind of thing, like, this doesn't change.
Marco:
Like, you still have people, whenever, like, when their Macs are having weird problems, you still have, like, everyone in the world telling them to, like, reset their PRAM and stuff.
Marco:
And, like, all these weird little, like, voodoo things that usually don't do anything.
Marco:
What Apple has done with this...
Marco:
is they have confirmed the fears of a very, very persistent and pervasive and damaging theory or myth that was going on about what Apple does with iPhones and iOS updates.
Marco:
I think this is going to hurt their reputation in this area for a decade.
Marco:
It might even be longer.
Marco:
This is the kind of thing that people do not forget quickly.
Marco:
This is the kind of thing that while we might know the truth or how things are perceived or what things probably mean or what Apple probably intends, we may know that.
Marco:
But where this is going to linger forever is like your crazy uncle at the Thanksgiving table and stuff like that.
Marco:
Like people who like kind of casual users who think they know what they're doing and who spread that knowledge around their friends and family.
Marco:
This is going to persist with them for a decade.
Marco:
And this is going to just be Apple's going to have to fight this for a decade.
Marco:
And what they really, really should have done instead, which would have... Anything they would have done here to solve this problem is hard.
Marco:
There's downsides to any solution to the problem.
Marco:
Like, oh, if your battery can't actually run the phone at its full speed and you get random shutdowns, well, yeah, that's bad.
Marco:
They should do something to fix that if they can.
Marco:
And they did.
Marco:
Even with the fix, even if they did it perfectly with great communication, people would say, I am upset that Apple is slowing down my phone until I replace the battery.
Marco:
But at least they would know.
Marco:
It wouldn't seem like deception.
Marco:
It wouldn't seem like there's this huge ulterior motive that they want you to buy a new phone.
Marco:
They want to trick you into buying a new phone.
Marco:
The only way to make this right...
Marco:
is to clearly communicate to the user when this throttling happens, to put up a notification or something.
Marco:
It can't just be buried in the battery screen and settings, like waiting for you to go check it.
Marco:
You have to notify the user with a dialogue or a notification that
Marco:
that says something like, your battery condition needs to be serviced or is too worn out or something like that.
Marco:
As a result, your phone will not perform at its fullest.
Marco:
Something like that.
Marco:
Tell people exactly what is happening when it happens.
Marco:
The first time that it has to be throttled by this mechanism, put up a notification, put up a dialogue that says...
Marco:
Your battery is too weak to do this.
Marco:
Your phone will now be slower because of this.
Marco:
And, you know, click here for more information or whatever.
Marco:
You have to tell people.
Marco:
This problem would have been so much smaller and more manageable and so much better received if they would just tell people when this happened.
Casey:
So I agree with you that the messaging is the crux of the issue, but do you really think Joe Consumer is going to be aware of this whole kerfuffle?
Casey:
Has this reached regular media?
Casey:
Because it seems to me like this is just...
Casey:
This is just nerds getting angry about nerdy things, is it not?
Casey:
Or maybe I'm missing the boat.
Marco:
Oh, no, no.
Marco:
I mean, first of all, my tweet about this has like hundreds of retweets already as of seven days ago.
Marco:
It's like this is spreading far and wide.
Marco:
Oh, okay.
Marco:
Regular people don't have to know about this.
Marco:
Their crazy uncles at the Thanksgiving table are the ones that have to know about this.
Marco:
And they're all the ones on Reddit who are picking all this up.
Marco:
Believe me, it spreads.
Marco:
It spreads to all of them.
Marco:
It's all those people who advise everyone in their life that they have to quit all their apps.
Marco:
It's the same thing.
Marco:
It's spreading through that support channel.
Marco:
The casual, crazy power user support channel of people who are partially but not adequately informed.
John:
and who spread that to all the people they know it this will be there for a decade you two aren't really helping much on this and neither are the million headlines that have been about this because i you know setting aside uh all the perception issues which are totally true and like you know there's at this point there's not much apple can do about it and they should have communicated better and so on and so forth everything marco's already covered um
John:
For the people who know or are casually listening to this podcast or it's on in the background or whatever, the essential thing that both of you did that I think is not the right thing to do is to promote the sort of summary narrative, like not the nuanced, detailed, exactly what's going on thing, but the summary narrative is that, as I would describe it, there was a perception that Apple's doing a thing to make their phone slower to make you buy new phones.
Yeah.
John:
People in the know said they're not doing that.
John:
But now we have new information that shows that actually they kind of were.
John:
And that's where I draw the line.
John:
Because the perception was Apple is doing something, doing whatever, to make you buy a new phone.
John:
That's the important part of the story.
John:
Because it makes Apple the bad guy.
John:
Not that Apple is doing something that makes your phone slow.
John:
Because we all know that Apple is doing something to make your phone slow.
John:
It's called releasing new OSs.
John:
Like, that's what they're doing.
John:
But that's what we would tell them.
John:
It's like, they're not doing it on purpose.
John:
They just made a new OS, and new OS is very often make your phone slower for all the reasons Marco listed, and we can go into all the details, and they don't even care, right?
John:
But they said, no, no, no.
John:
It's not like they're doing that.
John:
They're doing something on purpose that they don't have to do that's not part of the new OS to make your phone slower so that you will buy a new phone.
John:
Not for any other reason.
John:
Not because...
John:
uh you know they added more features or background processing or blah blah for no reason other than you must buy a new phone and to make the summary narrative it says we said they were never doing that but guess what they were they weren't they're not doing a thing to make you buy a new phone that i feel is the important thing and you're right that people don't won't catch this nuance like
John:
Everyone will just assume it's been confirmed, but I think it's irresponsible of people who run tech websites and do tech podcasts to say that in any way what came out today confirms the false narrative from before.
John:
It seems like it might if you don't know what you're talking about, and it will make people think it confirms.
John:
I totally agree that perception is there, like...
John:
But the truth of the situation is that Apple is not and was not doing something to make you buy a new phone.
John:
And that's the only nuance point I want to make to the people who care about nuance points.
John:
Not that it's going to help.
John:
You could talk about it as carefully as you want.
John:
People are going to believe what they want to believe.
John:
You know, so I'm totally pessimistic and cynical about the communication thing.
John:
But I do want to make that point here that I think no part of this confirms the false narrative.
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
John:
It makes people think it does, which is terrible for Apple.
John:
And Marco's right.
John:
This is going to be really, really bad for them.
John:
But it doesn't actually confirm it.
John:
And on that issue, if they had communicated it better, that would be better.
John:
But in the same way that I'm pessimistic, that even if you understand all the nuances, it doesn't matter.
John:
Like perception is reality to lots of people.
John:
uh it by the same token if apple had communicated this guarantee some percentage perhaps a smaller percentage but some percentage would say that message is fake apple just puts that up why do they put that up to make you buy a new phone they're lying to you with this dialogue box it says your phone's gonna slow to make you buy an oh what a coincidence new iphone comes out and i get this dialogue box on my old phone it's telling me i need to buy a new phone
John:
right now again doesn't mean they shouldn't do it it's still the right thing to do it's still way better than what they did but this is this is the job of you know and arguably this is why they made this uh this decision not to say anything about it because they're trying to they're trying to find the way to minimize the bad perceptions um and i think probably communicating would be the way to minimize it because the really hurtful part of this is like the the
John:
uh you know uh the error of omission the deception by omission of like apple never said anything about this before right and that that is a deceptive thing to do and so that's on apple and they deserve some of the reputation hit they they were taking there um but yeah there's no there's no perfect solution so i you know even if even if they change it to do that and i heard some good suggestions on twitter i forget who's just maybe it was marco maybe it was someone else like change the color of the
John:
to like purple or i don't know they already use red and green and yellow but some other color to show like it's not just that your battery is like lower in the middle but we found out that your battery is underperforming and and to what casey said uh at the beginning of this your battery doesn't give up it's just it just is not capable of delivering uh
John:
either the volts or the amps that are required by the cpu and the cpu has has things that cause it you know or not the cpu but like the parts of the electronics say look if my voltage or current or both drop below some threshold game over right and that's what's happening so the battery is they're dutifully pumping out as much energy as it can and the cpu is like nope sorry game over can't do it everything goes black um not that it really matters the details but anyway that's
John:
that's that's what's happening and you know the the if you want to get on apple for doing a thing that you know what what you know five why this down to like uh what is the root cause here you could get to the battery is not easily replaceable but you know it's not that expensive to replace it um
John:
You could get to the size of the battery.
John:
You could get to how long, if you use your phone like a regular person, how long does your battery last?
John:
Like the planned obsolescence thing is, I feel like different than the perception that Apple is doing, you know, an evil thing to make you buy a new phone.
John:
Because planned obsolescence, you could say, they make a sealed phone with a battery that will be crappy after two years.
John:
and they they know all those numbers they know how long it will last they know that it's sealed so on and so forth isn't that planned obsolescence because this phone is released to you and they know the plan is that if you use this like a regular phone it will be a much worse phone in two years and that's essentially their plan they could make a phone that becomes a much worse phone in a week they could make a plan a phone that becomes much worse phone in five years
John:
where have they chosen to draw that line is wherever they i don't know if it's two years i'm just making a number but that is a design choice and this brings me to a thing that has been buried in our show notes for a while that i will now hoist up because it is relevant this is a youtube video from god one of the things i hate it most about youtube is how hard they make it to find the stupid date from september 1st 2017
John:
This is another typical sensationally titled thing like all the articles today about, you know, new information reveals that Apple is just as deceptive as your crazy uncle always said.
John:
No, that's not what it confirms at all.
John:
Anyway, is Apple ruining your max performance?
John:
Question mark.
John:
Isn't that great?
Casey:
It's like every Doug DeMuro title ever.
John:
His are, well, yes, his are boring because they're two the same.
John:
The number one, the number one pinned comment on this is Apple ruining your Mac's performance.
John:
Spoiler alert, yes.
John:
This article is about thermal throttling on Macs, which actually Marco talked about a little bit.
John:
although he surmised it was thermal based like when you plugged in your external monitor at the at the beach house like how it slowed down the clocks on your your macbook pro am i remembering that right yeah this is this is a pretty a pretty significant uh limitation of the 2017 macbook pro actually yeah and this this is not just the this this test was an imac right so this is another case where again
John:
the sensational headline would make you think that apple is inserting code i mean this isn't about making you buy a new mac but apple's inserting code that says your computer could be faster but we're going to do something in software to make it not faster and withhold the performance from you because we're evil apple and we do this for insert reason that doesn't make any sense because obviously as as gruber points out and as many people point out like people think it's in apple's interest to make you buy a new phone but it is not in apple's interest to make you buy a new phone by sabotaging your current iphone
John:
Because that will just make you feel bad about iPhones, and it'll make you want to buy a different phone.
John:
But anyway, setting that aside, logic doesn't factor in.
John:
Like, again, perception doesn't matter.
John:
Logic does not enter into it.
John:
The reason so many Macs thermal throttle, and if you watch this video, this is about, like...
John:
gaming performance on an iMac or actually MacBook as well.
John:
Maybe it's both.
John:
I forget.
John:
Anyway, he puts it in like a freezer and runs the benchmark and having out of the freezer.
John:
So, you know, all these sort of temperature things.
John:
Look, I'm not, you know, I'm not making this up.
John:
Look, performance is here.
John:
But then as things warm up, performance goes down.
John:
You can see this stair step pattern in the graphs of what your frame rate is.
John:
and then you put it in the freezer and you don't see that like it's pretty clear that things inside this computer run at more or less full speed until it gets kind of hot and sweaty in there and the mechanisms inside the computer that are there to protect the silicon from you know melting itself say whoa whoa whoa let's start slowing things down and it cranks down the clock speed um and this doesn't have to do with battery life this has to do with like performance and
John:
I would say that, you know, again, Apple is not doing a malicious thing to make your computer bad because they are evil, you know, rubbing their hands together, villains twirling their mustaches.
John:
But they did design a computer.
John:
They did design a computer in which if you play a game on it in, you know, in a certain reasonable ambient temperature for human kind of room.
John:
eventually gets so hot that the mechanisms that protect the silicon will kick in and it will start throttling down and apple designed that computer right now is it a manufacturing defect did they put it together wrong is the thermal paste not working is the heat pipe not working right um or are they all like that or are they all like that after a certain number of years and then the beginning they're not like that whatever the thing is
John:
This is a product that Apple made and you are not getting all the performance you would hope to get out of it that you could get out of it if it had better cooling.
John:
And same thing with the plug in the external monitor, whether that is a sort of programmatic when the external monitor is plugged in, just throttle down immediately because we know there's going to be thermal issues or whether it just so happens that as soon as you plug in the external monitors, it immediately trips the thermal thing and it drops it down either way.
John:
Apple's ability to extract heat away from the heat sensitive components is inadequate to allow those components to run at their top rated speed all the time.
John:
And that is a design choice by Apple or a design flaw from Apple, however you want to phrase it.
John:
In no case is it malicious, but it is a real fact of the products.
John:
And, you know, another reason I'm waiting for a Mac Pro is like...
John:
you you know it's a compromise that you may say well that compromise allows it to be thinner and lighter especially with a laptop with an iMac it's harder to justify saying yeah it is thin back there but does it really need to be but we want it to be sleek and elegant whatever uh these these are real you know and and say this this is like the phone with like oh they chose to put a
John:
maybe if it was a bigger battery you'd have more headroom and you wouldn't have to charge it full as much and you could you know have have more buffer on either side of it sort of use the middle part of the battery like marcos tesla does or they could buy batteries from a different manufacturer or they could you know like there are things you can do to design the phone to try to avoid this situation and that i think is a legitimate place of potential difference with apple and uh arguably they have made different moves there because this is about the sixth generation
John:
with the shutdown stuff, the seven had a bigger, better battery than the six.
John:
Right.
John:
And the 10 seems to have a bigger, better battery still.
John:
Right.
John:
So it seems like they are making adjustments and learning from where they came from.
John:
But that I feel like is, you know, the communication stuff and everything it's, I feel for Apple, but at the same time,
John:
by being secretive and crossing their fingers that people wouldn't notice that's on them and they they you know they get all the bad pr i do feel bad that the the perception will not match up with reality uh even more so now because of this but i also think that
John:
The design choices that Apple has made that cause performance degradation, like their compromises, I'm not sure they have struck the right balance.
John:
It really depends on who you are.
John:
Obviously, tech nerds are going to say that, of course, you struck the wrong balance because I'll give up, you know, half a pound to get a non-throttled GPU.
John:
Other people might want the half a pound because they don't care about throttling and all they do is use Microsoft Word all day.
John:
But from my perspective as a tech nerd, it bothered me to get a product that has to be sort of, you know, babied or used in a freezer to get the to get sort of the rated performance out of it.
John:
Kind of not to trash on Marcos Tesla, but kind of like the Teslas where.
John:
a lot of people wrote in when we talked about teslas and road tests and how i felt like it wasn't getting its due and how you know it's such a great performance car but it's never put up against the real ones and a lot of people pointed out and i should have recalled this from reading all the lightning laps a lot of that is not just because it's not great at handling because it's really heavy but also because you drive a tesla hard around a racetrack and eventually the test is like
John:
and not so much how about you how about you lay off a little bit and it goes into not limp mode but it goes into please stop hurting me mode because my battery's getting really hot and i really don't like doing you know hot laps as they're called like literally hot laps uh i'm i'm not up for this and so it's hard to get a bunch of you know good lap times because you do one or two fast laps and the tesla's says no more
John:
like you know like thermal throttling on a mac and like uh the battery that can't give enough juice it says well can we just wait for the battery to cool down a little bit maybe and that's not something uh you're looking for in in a performance car so fast in a straight line uh not so fast around curves and you drive it fast for a long time and it really really doesn't like that and says with its electronics you will not be doing that anymore for a
John:
You know, my bad.
John:
So anyway, to wrap this up, somehow I've managed to turn this story about Apple software protecting its hardware into a story about how I really wanted the Mac Pro to not be thermal throttled and Apple should make its computers faster.
John:
Shock horse.
John:
Right.
John:
But yeah, like I said, if you take one thing away from this, take away the sad realization, the idea, the knowledge that
John:
None of this information actually confirms the evil things people used to think about Apple, but everyone will believe it does.
John:
And that's a bummer for Apple, and they're partially debris with bad PR handling.
John:
But you should continue not to believe that Apple purposely slows down computers because, A, that would be a dumb thing to do, and, B, they don't do it to make you buy a new phone.
Marco:
Also, please never put your computing devices in the freezer.
Marco:
Condensation exists.
Marco:
This is a problem.
Marco:
Put them in mineral oil.
Marco:
Come on.
Ugh.
Marco:
You probably don't know about this because you were always a Mac person.
Marco:
In case you might remember, do you remember back in one of the early heydays of overclocking in the very late 90s or early 2000s, overclockers started using, I don't know how these are pronounced, Peltier plates?
Marco:
Do you know what I'm talking about?
Marco:
I know about this.
Marco:
Do you think I know about this?
Marco:
So one of the ways that – water cooling was not extreme enough if you wanted to push like a Celeron up to 2 gigahertz or whatever.
Marco:
So people started using these Peltier devices, which are these like thermoelectric things.
Marco:
They're solid state, no moving parts, and you apply a ton of power to them.
Marco:
And one side gets super cold and one side gets super hot.
Marco:
I think anti-griddles use these.
Marco:
I'm not sure.
Marco:
But anyway, however you pronounce those things, overclockers decided that this was a good way to get even colder cooling of their CPUs.
Marco:
They could push them even further.
Marco:
And it's especially egregious because...
Marco:
All the power that it draws, which is a lot to perform this cooling, the hot side gets all the heat of the processor plus that wattage that it's using.
Marco:
So, like, the cold side gets a little cold.
Marco:
The hot side gets really hot.
Marco:
It was the MacDLT of cooling solutions.
Marco:
Hot side hot, cold side cold.
Marco:
I miss the MacDLT.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Anyway, and so one of the problems, one of the reasons, one of the many reasons why people I don't think really use those for more than about six months is because once you introduce the possibility for something in your computer case to get below ambient temperature, you start having problems with condensation and possibly frost.
Marco:
And this is a really big problem inside of a computer case.
Marco:
Electronics do not like water.
Marco:
And, of course, they decided, okay, now we can back off frost and condensation, and now we can just go to pumping water through our case.
Marco:
That's much better.
John:
Well, I mean, like you said, it's all about ambient temperature because if you start making the surrounding air cooler and it can no longer hold the water that is in it, it condenses out of the air, that's a problem.
John:
But if everything is at air temperature or higher, it's still way lower than the temperature of the little hot piece of silicon in there.
John:
So you're fine.
John:
with condensation you just got to make sure you have no leaks so is that it on the uh deliberately planned obsolescence that may or may not really be a thing it's not you're doing it again not may or may not really be a thing it's not really a thing i'm kidding this is the problem like no matter how much people talk about it but like yeah but this does kind of confirm what everyone said doesn't it
John:
No, no, it doesn't, because what they were saying was not that they're slung down the computer, but for a reason.
John:
And I know this is a nuance, and I totally agree that no one is going to get this, but the ATP listeners will know.
John:
And I would caution you, ATP listeners, do not attempt to explain this to other people like at Christmas dinner, because it will not go over well.
John:
Just nod your head and say, you were right all along.
John:
Don't even confirm that they were right.
John:
Just go have a different conversation.
Marco:
No, guess what?
Marco:
You're not going to be the one bringing it up.
Marco:
All of our listeners, who are known probably as the computer people in their family, all their other relatives are going to ask them about it.
Marco:
You won't have to bring it up.
Marco:
People will ask you.
John:
Then you can tell them the truth, I suppose, but it's a nuance that people don't care about because people really, really want to be right about their conspiracy.
John:
We can get into the psychology of this.
John:
Everyone wants to...
John:
seem like they are savvy like that the world's not pulling one over me like this is how they get you like uh the world attempts to pull one over but i'm no dummy i know what the truth is so apple people think apple's great but i know the truth about apple the truth about apple is they intentionally make your phone slower to make you buy a new one and i'm on you know they're they're not fooling me right and it's important to them to
John:
feel like they are that the world is not fooling them this is often people who are uh mostly being fooled by almost everything in the world and so they you know that it's important that they're that they show that that's not the case um so they no matter how much like you can't you will never convince these people that it's not the case like there is no like literally you will never convince them like if they if they could personally speak to and live with for a year every employee living and dead of apple
John:
and be truly convinced that they were never doing this they would do that in their infant lifespan come back and say yeah but i kind of think they were really doing it well and it really doesn't help that that apple just basically proved the first two-thirds of their theory correct yeah no that's the thing like the important there is no two-thirds of the theory they like the conclusion like it's like
John:
This is what they're doing.
John:
They're doing it to make you buy a new phone.
John:
Because the other part of it is not something to get worked about.
John:
They're doing it to make sure the hardware... Does it make sure my phone doesn't turn off?
John:
Well, that doesn't sound like something I should get that mad about.
John:
Because they don't care about the nuances like PR, communication, and so on and so forth.
John:
Maybe, if you want to convince them, maybe you could say, what you should really be mad about is the fact that Apple didn't say this earlier.
John:
And then they can get mad about that, and maybe they'll feel like they still are righteously angry.
John:
And they can be righteously angry about that.
John:
That's fine.
John:
But some people will never give up on the notion...
John:
of malice that like like like volkswagen engineers secretly uh cheating emissions tests because that's the worst thing about this as gruber points out in his article he used uber as an example because he doesn't know about the automotive world but vw is probably a more apt example um
John:
Large corporations do legitimately do actual, actively, maliciously evil, cheaty things like this.
John:
You know, not by accident, not to protect the engine, but like detect when you're being emission tested and pretend like you have less emissions than you do.
John:
But then really, when you get used as a car, put out way more emissions.
John:
Volkswagen did that.
John:
That's not good for that company.
John:
So it's not a stretch to believe the corporation would do that.
John:
But, you know, the reason I mean, I guess we have to say like the reason
John:
we all believe apple wouldn't do this is mostly because it doesn't make sense i mean it's partially because we know people at apple and we trust apple and believe it and maybe we're suckers and blah blah blah but also because unlike cheating on emissions tests which has a big upside for vw if they can pull it off
John:
successfully pulling off intentionally making your phones worse to make people buy new ones like it wouldn't make people buy new ones as gruber has pointed out many many times it would make people buy an android phone like if they knew like if their phones just get worse and this has happened by the way with the shutdown stuff i've seen stuff like i bought my last iphone but then it just kept turning off forget it next time i'm getting an android phone it's way cheaper anyway right
John:
that's what actually happens if you intentionally or not intentionally if the phone you have starts getting worse you know like like casey with his bmw if your engine keeps blowing up you're thinking maybe my car next car won't be a bmw he's not like that clever bmw tricking me into buying another bmw by making my engine blow up intentionally that's not not how the world works but people do really want to feel like that you know they understand how they get you and the world's not pulling one over on them so
Marco:
Well, because in this case, the world did pull one over on them, and this one's the only fix to this.
Marco:
I mean, it's going to be a long-term reputation problem, and having malice attributed to it is going to be a very long-term problem.
Marco:
But the only way to start fixing this is to communicate about it from the phone.
Marco:
A PR statement is not enough, because most of these people will not read PR statements, and if they do, they won't believe them.
Marco:
The phone has to tell them when this throttling happens and tell them why it's happening.
Marco:
How much do you think that will help?
Marco:
I agree that it will help, but how much?
Marco:
Oh, massively.
Marco:
Because that totally changes the view of it.
Marco:
Not for everybody.
Marco:
They're not going to convince everybody.
Marco:
But it will at least appear that they're not trying to hide this fact from you.
Marco:
Because the narrative is that they are secretly, trickily slowing down your phone.
Marco:
If they tell you your phone can't run at full speed because the battery is too worn out, that's a very different look.
Marco:
And again, that's going to piss people off too, but not as many.
Marco:
It's way fewer.
John:
Well, let's give a percentage.
John:
If 100% is everyone suddenly has good feelings and 0% is this doesn't make anybody feel better, what percentage would you say that this helps?
John:
maybe half to two-thirds i'd say i mean a lot we're on the same page because i think it's half as well my guess would be about half like a half of the people will be will see that dialogue and will be like yeah it's a bummer but i understand what's going on and the other half of the people like i said will say this dialogue box proves that apple's trying to get me a new phone by lying to me with this dialogue box so it is way better than what they did this time but i'm pessimistic that
John:
And if you think about it, the not saying anything strategy, pretend the not saying anything strategy had been ongoing.
John:
And this whole information had not come out.
John:
They just continued with the not saying anything thing.
John:
Apple could have theoretically weathered that storm and just put better batteries in their phone and eventually the sixes all cycle out.
John:
And then, you know, they sort of quote unquote win.
John:
So, you know, this strategy they chose to do is riskier, right?
John:
Because something like what just happened could happen.
John:
But the potential upside, I think, is better than the 50% solution where half the people think now the dialog box is proof positive that Apple is trying to trick you into buying a new phone by making your phone slower because that dialog box is total BS.
John:
My battery's fine.
John:
I know it's fine.
John:
But it's telling me I need a new phone.
John:
It's just, you know, anyway.
Marco:
Well, and to be clear, they said in a statement that right now it applies to iPhone 6 and 6S, but the 7 is going to be added soon, and future devices will be added as time goes on.
Marco:
They said that.
Marco:
So it isn't a problem inherent to the 6 and 6S.
Marco:
This problem isn't going to go away.
John:
Right, but I think the battery is better in the 7, though.
John:
I think they put a bigger battery in it, and that supposedly will make it so it doesn't go undercurrent.
John:
So maybe it'll last instead of two years, two and a half years, or whatever.
John:
I think they're...
John:
because i think the root problem is sort of the design lifetime of the phone right it's not like you know they have to pick a design lifetime like you have to like i said they could pick any number they wanted as their target right i think they've been moving their target up which will help them with this problem there is no no phone that can make a design where this problem will never come up unless they have totally different battery technology so they have to pick a time and no matter what
John:
they need to have this messaging so if someone happens to keep their phone they make a phone the last five years um so what if someone keeps it for six years you still need this all this mechanism in there for when it goes bad it's just a question of what that number is and i think the number is farther out on the sevens and tenths we'll see we'll see when they when they have the software feature i mean you'll find out basically of like do people have sevens now that are like switching off like kc6 used to
John:
or are all the sevens too young at this point i don't know i i haven't heard it i mean i have a seven so i'll be watching for it but um it's an inherent problem with the battery technology and the problem with having a seal battery and all that stuff um and so communication will help with that but i think apple also dreads the idea of people seeing that dialogue box because
John:
Some people, some percentage of people will see that dialogue box and have a concrete thing to point to, to say that Apple is malicious and evil.
John:
Like the look at this dialogue box, Apple's coming right out and telling me you should buy a new phone because we're, you know, we're artificially making your phone slow to make you buy a new phone.
John:
Like that's how they'll read that dialogue box.
John:
And that's a bummer.
Marco:
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Casey:
uh apple is taking a page from the windows playbook i wouldn't say that just at least i hope not just today and by today i mean exactly seven days ago uh apple or i should say that that bloomberg released a uh a post this is mark german
Casey:
saying Apple plans combined iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps to create one user experience.
Casey:
Speaking of a Microsoft tagline, one user experience.
John:
And speaking of a headline that does not accurately represent the ideas contained in the article.
Casey:
That's true, too.
Casey:
I'm shocked.
Casey:
Yeah, no way.
Casey:
So this is, again, a post by Gurman.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
And the summary seems to be that there will be a change probably next year, if he's right, that what we currently think of as a universal app, or maybe there'll be a new term for it, but there will be a mechanism by which the same app can be run on iOS and macOS.
Casey:
And so in the same way that we have universal apps on the iOS App Store, which can be run on iPhone and iPad, in the future, and I guess Apple Watch, although that's not really part of being universal, but anyway, but it's three different platforms.
Casey:
In the future, there may or perhaps will be a mechanism by which we will have the same app
Casey:
Running on iPhone, on iPad, potentially on Apple Watch and on Mac OS.
Casey:
And nobody really knows what the engineering mechanism is behind this.
Casey:
But that supposedly is the future, if you believe Mark Gurman.
Casey:
So I think it's worth pontificating about what the different paths are to this end.
Casey:
But before we go down that road, are there any immediate thoughts on this, starting with John?
John:
I think the important thing, the important part of the story to think about, and this is just a rumor, so we don't know, blah, blah, blah.
John:
They did a lot of equivocating in this.
John:
Like, oh, but it might come next year, but they might cancel it, but it might not.
John:
Great.
John:
Okay.
John:
So...
John:
The motivation behind this is something that we've talked about in this show a lot, specifically when Marco's been making Mac applications and stuff.
John:
Poorly.
John:
Yeah, the struggles he's had with that.
John:
Here's what I think, why I believe that projects like this are conceivably going on inside Apple and may actually ship.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Apple has an important asset that they brag about in keynotes all the time, but that I think people tend not to think about that much, which is, you know, when they put up that slide, it says we have X number of thousands or millions of developers.
John:
They brag about number apps, but number of apps is a proxy for number of developers because developers are writing those apps.
John:
Apple used to have a certain amount of people who were Mac developers, but now they have way, way more people who are iOS developers.
John:
There are a lot of iOS developers.
John:
That is a tremendous asset for Apple.
John:
It's a huge number of people who know how to write applications for iOS and do it to make money.
John:
It's a virtuous cycle.
John:
Like, you know, the whole marketplace, it's great for Apple makes money when they make money.
John:
But really, the important asset is a bunch of people out there know how to write iOS apps.
John:
Fewer people out there know how to write Mac apps.
John:
Fewer every year because the Mac developers get older and most people who are learning to write apps are learning to write them on iOS.
John:
one way apple could deal with this is say we're just going to sunset the mac whatever the mac was the past ios is the future all these developers know how to develop for ios we'll just let all the mac developers retire and go off into the sunset and we'll can the mac line and blah blah blah uh you know and everything we've seen out of apple vr has said no we're not doing that the mac is important blah blah blah and yeah it's important until it's not but so far the messaging is pretty clear thumbs up on the mac in fact we're rededicating ourselves to the mac
John:
uh the mac is an important product the mac and ios fill different roles we're never gonna force the mac to be like ios or force ios to be like the mac all those things that they said but they do have the problem of a small number of mac developers a small number of mac apps and smaller all the time like tons of applications are available on ios and tv os but not on the mac and
John:
in the old days of just the pc world of course they'd be available on the mac if they were available on any app platform now many things are available on our platform it's not available on the mac and one of the big reasons is you have all these developers who know our ios apps but they don't know how to write mac apps and writing mac apps is different enough that it is non-trivial to do that so they're assuming apple wants to keep the mac around which they keep saying they do
John:
One way to solve that problem is to find a way to let the huge number of people who know how to write iOS apps reuse some or all of those skills to target the Mac.
John:
And that, I think, is what any project like this would be about.
John:
It would be about leveraging that asset to bring up their other platform.
John:
And yes, the unification is important, too, like trying to unify.
John:
But the reason I said this headline was misleading is because it says...
John:
to create one user experience.
John:
But then you read the article and it's like, the application sometimes will use touch, but then sometimes we'll use a mouse and a pointer.
John:
It's like, that's not one user experience.
John:
That's two user experiences.
John:
And it should be because a mouse cursor is different than touch and you can't use, you know, different things work in different, you know.
John:
Anyway, this is all about...
John:
Leveraging those skills.
John:
And I think Marco already talked about this on one of his podcasts that he's already recorded in the past future.
John:
I don't know how time works anymore.
John:
The days of future past.
John:
Seven days ago, we discussed that under the radar.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But I think you'll hear a lot about iOS developers saying
John:
If I could use my skills to either make a Mac app or to bring the app that I already have on iPhone and iPad to the Mac, maybe that would make sense.
John:
At the very least, I would entertain it.
John:
I wouldn't rule it out.
John:
I'd have to see if it makes sense in terms of economics and so on and so forth.
John:
There are some potential upsides and special downsides, but
John:
a lot of time you know like it it's when you remove the barrier and say you can use your skills that you have for ios and you know you know how to use ui kit and make table views and do all this stuff and there's some new stuff you might learn but you can reuse your code and you can reuse your skills and to you know to varying extents they would be open to that idea because it is potential new way to make money and yes it's a smaller platform but
John:
In theory, we don't know if this is true, but in theory, you might be able to charge even higher prices than you do on the iPad.
John:
So that's the lens through which I'm viewing all these rumors and getting at what Casey was talking about.
John:
Yeah, but how?
John:
But how would they do that?
John:
There are many ways that they could do it that would be bad for Mac users and bad for developers.
John:
Like, they could blow it.
John:
But if I wanted to put up, like, what are the goals of this project?
John:
The goals are leverage one of Apple's greatest assets, tons of developers who know how to develop for iOS.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So before we talk how, Marco, any other thoughts?
Marco:
The devil's in the details.
Marco:
But conceptually, I love this idea.
Marco:
It is not going to be an easy thing to do.
Marco:
Assuming this is really a thing they're working on.
Marco:
that's not easy because the two platforms are very, very different from each other.
Marco:
And I don't just mean at an API level.
Marco:
I'm talking about just at an interaction and usefulness level and the needs of a Mac app versus iOS.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
In many ways, developing on iOS is way easier because there's a lot of things that you don't have to worry about that on the Mac you have to accommodate or think about or support just because people expect different kinds of interactions on the Mac.
Marco:
Just simple things like you have the entire menu system.
Marco:
You also have things like drag and drop and...
Marco:
different types of data-providing services that you have, all sorts of different... You have windowing, multiple windows, multiple documents being open, the entire document system behind that.
Marco:
You have things like undo, which you don't have really on iOS.
Marco:
All sorts of...
Marco:
of rich behaviors that have been built over time, many of which quite a long time ago, that people expect all, like, you know, quote, computer apps to be able to do now.
Marco:
Things like scriptability, even, like, there's so, so much that Mac apps do that iOS developers don't ever have to worry about or don't have to even think about.
Marco:
Making something that can do that rich power of the Mac...
Marco:
with iOS-like code or iOS-like UI frameworks, that's not a small job.
Marco:
And there's lots of ways to do that very badly.
Marco:
And so a lot of Mac people are wary of this announcement, or they were seven days ago at least, where they're worried.
Marco:
We don't want the equivalent of...
Marco:
an iOS app running in a simulator window, just, you know, and here we are, like, dragging our mouse over to simulate touch swipes and everything.
Marco:
Like, nobody wants that.
Marco:
And if that's what this ends up being, that would be a huge failure on a number of levels and a tragedy, honestly.
Marco:
But I have a feeling Apple's better than that.
Marco:
I don't think they would do that.
Marco:
I think if they're going to do this at all, hopefully they're going to do a really good job of it.
Marco:
And that's, again, that's not easy.
Marco:
And it wouldn't surprise me if they go down this road, if they've been going down this road for a while, and then they eventually decide, you know what, this actually isn't good enough.
Marco:
We shouldn't do this anymore.
Marco:
That wouldn't surprise me at all.
John:
but i feel like even if they did and maybe they've done that three times already they would take another run at it because i feel like the only two possible options are sunset the mac or find a way to leverage the your your fleet because eventually uh you know in in a not huge number of years would you say on an infinite time no non-infinite on a finite and fairly short time scale that one just gets the desk on the number of people who know how to make a good mac app is not going up
John:
it's just not right this and the number of people who know how to make a good ios app is going up and there's a tremendous number of this you have to find a way to either you know don't have people develop the mac anymore or repurpose repoint your your big asset of that fleet of developers at the mac because that's the only way you're going to get an ongoing supply of good mac apps right
John:
And so I think, you know, like you said, there are just so many ways to do this wrong.
John:
Right.
John:
And if they tried a bunch of approaches and they suck, I think they would say, OK, but let's try again with a different approach.
John:
Eventually, you assume the one they come out with is one is an approach that they feel kind of OK with.
John:
But, you know, they can blow it and try again.
John:
um anyway for the approaches i think there's a few obvious ones um a couple of the obvious ones it's not clear to me whether these are approaches that they've decided suck and they don't want to pursue but at the very least these are approaches they have code for are things like ux kit which is like what uh when a lot of applications started appearing on the mac and people said they looked and smelled kind of like ios applications a lot of them used
John:
either actual ux kit or similar approaches where it is like a ui kit sort of facade that just calls app kit stuff under the covers to let you repurpose code that you originally wrote for ios devices to make an application a quote-unquote mac application that kind of looks and behaves a little bit like an ios application photos for the mac is a great example this you know arguably like contacts or even something like the new notes application a lot of these applications that you look at them what maps yeah
John:
a lot of apps out there they kind of i mean there's a family resemblance but also like behavior wise you can kind of tell that they're not just using straight app kit because a lot of the stuff that you basically get for free with app kit doesn't exist in these applications like different behaviors different you know behaviors in terms of focus and keyboard shortcuts and stuff like that that are just different for reasons that don't make sense until you realize that they probably just reused a lot of ui kit code so
John:
a ux get like approach is one possible way to do that and like i said it's not clear to me whether they did that and decided actually that's not great so we're not taking that approach or they did that over many years with many applications decided actually this approach works pretty well and this is what we're going to go with so uh that approach would be essentially
John:
a new framework that's not app kit but not ui kit but it looks very much like ui kit and lets people reuse some of their code from ui kit maybe with small tweaks but a lot of their skills oh i kind of know how table views work i know how buttons work i know how you know animations and transitions work right and there's tons of new stuff you have to learn too with menus and so on and so forth um but that's one approach a second approach is make a new toolkit and unfortunately apple has really used up all the a
John:
it's a kit for making apps oh we can't call it app kit it's a ui oh no forget about that one it's an hi tool but no never mind like they've really used hi kit is one of the ones i've heard like you can combine kit with anyway come up with a new framework that looks almost exactly like ui kit because presumably ui kit represents the best thinking the company has about how to make a ui
John:
but with changes to fundamental things about it that allow it to handle all the things the mac does menus cursors you know scroll bars blah blah and also all the things the ui kit does so that's the that's the kind of the actual sort of grand unified like there is one framework to write applications for everything and that would mean that it's not a shim on top of app kit that
John:
um presumably they would implement whatever behaviors they implemented would define going forward what it means to be mac like right as opposed to now where app kit defines what it means to be at mac like more or less and app kit itself is influenced by being smushed together with carbon and hi toolkit and all that other stuff that's why that what defines our definition of mac like and that definition changed from classic mac os as well so it's not like the definition of mac like can't change
John:
but yeah an entirely new framework to do it and that new framework would also be the same new framework that people use for ios so when you wrote your ios application you would also use this is like the one new framework that can do everything the risks in that are hey why are you messing up all of these these ios developers days well i learned all this ui kit stuff and now i have to learn this new thing that yeah it looks like not like ui kit but why do i want to use that if it's just like ui kit but subtly different with a bunch of mac crap that i don't care about why would i learn that so that's
John:
That is more difficult to pull off and risky, but potentially the reward is finally Apple has one way to write applications for all its platforms.
John:
And they have a unified API.
John:
But in all of these solutions, and I think the real place where any of these solutions are going to be really hard to come up with something that ends up being a win for all involved is, as this headline incorrectly states, it's not one user experience for everybody.
John:
Apple still seems dedicated to the idea that a mouse pointer and cursor and the Mac user interface will continue to be a thing.
John:
and applications that work like that are different than applications that work when you're touching them with your finger in fundamental important ways and there's really no way to say this one magic application just magically works everywhere i made a tweet earlier today it was uh write thrice run anywhere which is a a joke on the old java thing of write once run anywhere write thrice means even if it is a unified toolkit and it's the same thing everywhere you use xcode use one framework and you write an application that runs on all these platforms
John:
You still have essentially to quote unquote write it thrice, which means you have to write the Mac version and do all the stuff with the menus and the keyboard shortcuts and the drag and drop and everything that the Mac has to do.
John:
And, you know, right.
John:
You have to write the iPhone version, which is a known quantity.
John:
And you have to write the iPad version.
John:
It's like, well, why do you have to write the iPad version?
John:
That's not another version.
John:
Ask somebody with an iOS app if the iPad version comes for free because they use UIKit.
John:
It does not come for free.
John:
you have to not write it thrice like it's three times the application but just because the screen gets bigger you have to say let me rethink how my application works right i have to add new elements to it i have to potentially add new features you know like it's not enough to just be a phone app that is stretched to be a little bit wider so there's no way of avoiding having to write a good application for every platform if the platforms continue to be different in both form factor and in the case of the mac you
John:
you know interface paradigm like that's very different and an environment yeah and no no framework no ui framework will ever eliminate that work all it can do is say the only work you have to do is that work to make a good a good application that works in the mac a good app but you won't have to relearn how like colors work right you don't have to relearn how like to play audio like you know just
John:
that that they'll unify the underlying things and have one unified framework and one unified language and ide and one unified binary but you still have to design essentially three different applications or three very different forms and by the way the watch which you know they could unify that as well and not have watch kit and have that would be a variant of this thing if they want to go whole hog but there's no there's no avoiding that it's not one user experience it's one i guess framework one language you know
John:
And maybe not even that if they end up going with the shim approach.
John:
So I believe they have to do this.
John:
But, boy, there's a lot of ways it could mess up.
John:
And so I wish them luck.
Casey:
So if they go whole new framework, so they make HI kit or whatever you want to call it.
Casey:
I mean, come on, it's Swift.
Casey:
It would just be called Kit.
Casey:
Well, it's funny you say that, because my question was going to be, do they abandon Objective-C?
Casey:
I don't see why that would be either productive or necessary, but, Marco, do you think they would abandon Objective-C in this hypothetical HI kit?
Absolutely.
Marco:
If it's intended to be in development now and come out in a year or two, maybe.
Marco:
But as time goes on, on a finite timescale, the longer it is from now, I think the more likely that that would be the approach.
Marco:
I'm not even going to say it's unlikely even now.
Marco:
I would say that that would be reasonable.
John:
like i don't think that would be overly aggressive to make kit require swift like to just have to be a swift only framework that's different than saying objective c is gone because like even if they went full swift you have to keep the objective c runtime around for a really really long time because it's how swift calls into all the other code right so you know so like but that's not what we're talking about we're just saying like would you have to write it in objective c right the one thing i think they probably will do is
John:
is no 32-bit ever for whatever this thing is i mean the mac itself as it exists is going to lose 32-bit probably next year right so that's that's a gimme um it's possible that depending on the timelines if they switch the mac to arm this could be arm only depending on you know is this one year five year whatever you know that that timeline could coincide to simplify matters these are all low-level things that really in the end don't matter like i think
John:
we're into it because you know either software developers are into software development things and we're interested in the nitty-gritty details but the bottom line like the most interesting thing from the consumer's perspective is apple's plan to continue to sell devices of different sizes and different forms continuing to sell you know things that we call macs things that we call iphones things that we call ipads things that we call watchers all which have
John:
uh different ways to interact with them some are closer to each other than other ipads are very similar to an iphone but a watch is very different from both of them and the mac is very different from the ios devices but there's a range of hardware devices they sell and and presumably will continue to sell because they're not giving up on that range like they're not you know they can make new hybrids like jason and i talked on upgrade about uh
John:
an ios laptop like there's other form factors that can be explored um and the other one is obviously touch coming to the mac and how that might influence things uh but we met and case you mentioned microsoft at the beginning of this uh topic i think that's an important lesson because microsoft for all its success or failure in actually pulling this off was way ahead on the thinking of we're going to try to make one software platform that lets you write applications for all sorts of different weird form factors
John:
And so they have laptops that are convertible into tablets that have touchscreens on them, or they also have tablets.
John:
And at one time they had phones and they tried to run the whole range with a single unified platform that you'd have to write, you know, different style applications for.
John:
I forget what, what was their thing?
John:
It was like WMP or something like that.
Casey:
They had an acronym for UMP, I believe.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Unified windows platform or something.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Something like that.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
That, that approach, uh,
John:
if apple could snap its fingers and have something like that now they would love to have it because the hard work is coming up with a single framework that could span all those things uh but as far as consumers concerned the interesting part is so can i buy a thing from apple where it like runs mac you know it runs adobe photoshop like the legacy version but also i can get all the new apps but also i can touch a screen but also it looks like a laptop like the the unified apple platform
John:
is a time to make different decisions about the boundaries between these things like you can get rid of the mac ios whatever distinction and try to have these universal apps and we're all set aside economics for now that's a whole other can of worms but like i think it is an opportunity to revisit how those boundaries are drawn because if you're making a new framework or you know a new shim type framework or whatever it is that you're doing
John:
That's an opportunity to consider how could the Mac be different in ways that allow you to make touch a useful interface for Macs.
John:
And if you've used a Windows convertible or laptop with a touchscreen or whatever, you have some experience with this.
John:
Microsoft is way ahead in both figuring out what makes sense for touching the screens of PCs, for lack of a better term, and also making the frameworks that allow you to do it.
John:
apple's lucky they just haven't been particularly successful in the market with their approach but like that you learn you learn by doing and microsoft has done many different attempts at this and from all accounts each time they try their new surface whatever thing and the new operating system that runs on it makes a an ever more compelling case for
John:
being open to different form factors and different kinds of input instead of the sort of rather rigid boundary, certainly between the Mac and iOS, but arguably also between like, you know, uh, the iOS devices of different sizes.
John:
So I'm, I'm most excited from a consumer perspective of seeing Apple.
John:
Like that's what I want out of a unified thing.
John:
It's not like, yeah, the unified technical underpinnings would be awesome, but like,
John:
that finally it gives the Apple the freedom to spread it, to make new variations along the spectrum instead of being siloed into this is what a Mac's like and this is what a phone is like and they're so different from each other and there's no crossover and don't try to do it.
John:
No iOS laptops, no touchscreen Macs, never, never, never.
John:
If it's a unified platform, there's no reason for that distinction anymore, and now they can start exploring different steps along the spectrum.
Marco:
Yeah, I actually look forward to that because I do think it's pretty clear.
Marco:
The industry and consumers have spoken on the issue of touch laptops, and as much as Apple says, this isn't a good experience, nobody wants this, it turns out a lot of people want it, and they do it anyway, and they try it, and they touch their screens, and nothing happens.
Marco:
This is like...
Marco:
Apple is losing that fight in actuality, whether they know it or not, and I think they probably do know it at this point.
Marco:
They tried one last-ditch effort with Touch Bar and giant trackpads, but that's not enough.
Marco:
That's not what people actually want.
Marco:
What people actually want is to have to touch the screen sometimes, or to be able to touch the screen sometimes.
Marco:
That's what people are actually doing and wanting and expecting.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Anything that gets us closer to that, I think, is a good direction for the Mac to take.
Marco:
Because, again, the reality is, like, this is what people are doing.
Marco:
And a lot of this, I think, the whole idea of this cross-platform UI framework needing to exist, I think, you know, you've put it well, John, that, like, regardless of what you think people should do here, you know, a lot of Mac developers say people should just write Mac apps in AppKit.
Marco:
And, yeah, they should.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But they're not.
Marco:
The reality is very different.
Marco:
The reality is that all the action is happening on iOS in the Apple world.
Marco:
They can't get people to care enough about the Mac to develop a lot of Mac apps anymore.
Marco:
The Mac feels increasingly like a very stale, low-priority platform for a lot of developers, including Apple.
Marco:
They have to do something to make it easier for people to bring Mac apps over.
Marco:
And if they don't, we're going to have the situation we have now on the Mac that's going to slowly worsen, which is, right now, we already have tons of major applications that are not available on the Mac.
Marco:
uh that or or that have really neglected low priority mac versions like the twitter app you know um and then we have a lot of apps that say oh just use the web app and i'm guilty i'm guilty of myself obviously um netflix is a great example because you can't even watch 4k netflix on a mac because there's no 4k support probably for some dumb copyright reason
Marco:
right exactly and like there's so many types of apps where the answer on the Mac is either sorry we don't support it or just use our web app best case scenario for a lot of complex things like Slack you get these like weird web native apps that nobody likes because they're terrible in a lot of ways and perform badly and use all your RAM and aren't Mac like and everything else so like
Marco:
Anything... That's the status quo.
Marco:
That's the reality.
Marco:
The reality is AppKit is the past.
Marco:
And as capable as it is to the people who know it, the market has said otherwise.
Marco:
Economics have said otherwise.
Marco:
And people's attention has said otherwise.
Marco:
In many ways, it's similar to Swift versus Objective-C.
Marco:
In that Objective-C, for people like me who know it really well...
Marco:
Swift came along and were like, I don't need that.
Marco:
I want to just keep using the thing I already know how to use.
Marco:
It's totally fine.
Marco:
But the reality was one of the reasons they did need Swift, which we talked about at the time it came out, is that Objective-C was old and crufty and it turned off new developers.
Marco:
Developers were actively avoiding writing Objective-C because it was old and crufty and it didn't fit modern aesthetics for programming languages.
Marco:
AppKit has that problem as an entire API.
Marco:
Like, AppKit is really old and crufty, and when an iOS developer sees AppKit for the first time, it is not a positive impression at all.
Marco:
And as an iOS developer working through this, and I know other people who've done the same thing, it's like...
Marco:
it's really... It doesn't ever let up.
Marco:
There are certain parts of it that when you first discover what NSDocument does automatically for you, you're like, wow, this is really capable.
Marco:
This is awesome.
Marco:
But there's just so much friction in getting those interfaces developed.
Marco:
And to be clear, like...
Marco:
The lower level frameworks, like all the audio stuff, a lot of the data types and stuff, a lot of those things are already unified.
Marco:
Like a lot of the networking.
Marco:
There's so much stuff that is already unified between the two platforms.
Marco:
The main area where this is necessary is the UI layer.
Marco:
And there are just so many differences.
Marco:
It's not like so many things work completely differently between macOS and iOS.
Marco:
It's a huge barrier to developing for the Mac.
Marco:
It is so hostile and unfriendly and you can't look up help on the web because there's almost no results for it.
Marco:
It's like a ghost town of old cruft and unfriendliness.
Marco:
And I know that's not like... If you're familiar with it, if you're an expert on AppKit, you don't see it that way.
Marco:
But for all the rest of the iOS developers who are not familiar with it, that is how it is.
Marco:
So even though it is fine for its current developers...
Marco:
it needs to change because the entire world has changed around it.
Marco:
So something has to happen here.
Marco:
And the Mac, if they gave the Mac its own completely new UI framework that was not shared with anything, look at what happened with tvOS.
Marco:
tvOS had that.
Marco:
It had a whole new framework that was mostly not UIKit.
Marco:
It kind of has its own stuff.
Marco:
Although it has way more in common with UIKit than AppKit does.
Marco:
And making a tvOS app is really uncompelling because you have to rewrite your entire UI from scratch and it's just not very good.
Marco:
WatchOS has a similar problem.
Marco:
WatchKit is very little like UIKit, although it's still way more like it than AppKit.
Marco:
And making a WatchKit app is really not compelling because these are like smaller usage platforms.
Marco:
The iPad is a great example and I think probably honestly a big part of why this kind of thing might be done is
Marco:
On the iPad, you know, John, you said earlier, like, you know, you don't get an iPad app for free, but you do get it for cheap.
Marco:
Like if you have an iPhone app, to port it to the iPad is effort, but it's not a ton of effort.
Marco:
It's nowhere near the amount of effort.
John:
Yeah, because it uses the same UI framework, but then like to make a good iPad app, you have to redesign some part of it.
Marco:
Yeah, but it's like... Overcast's iPad app is used by something like 5% or less of people.
Marco:
I use it every day, but most people don't use it.
Marco:
But it's about 5% extra work to do it also, so it was worth it to me.
Marco:
And yeah, it could be better than it is.
Marco:
It could be more iPad-optimized, but it doesn't need to be.
Marco:
Right now, it's fine on the iPad.
Marco:
There's no glaring shortcomings with it.
Marco:
It's totally fine.
Marco:
And it didn't need to be that much work, and it isn't that much of a maintenance headache ongoing.
Marco:
If the Mac can be anywhere near that, I don't expect the Mac to be as easy to port to.
John:
It's going to be harder because you've got menus and all that and no touch interface, right?
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So it's not going to be the same.
Marco:
It's not going to be as easy as porting to the iPad from iPhone.
Marco:
But if it can be somewhere near that, if it can be only three times harder instead of 20 times harder, that's a huge, huge gain.
Marco:
That could lead to so many more Mac apps.
Marco:
And honestly, as you said, John, honestly, I think I'm not sure the Mac has much of a choice because the reality is that if they don't do something like this, it's just going to keep stagnating and it will die.
Marco:
That is it.
Marco:
That is the future of the Mac.
Marco:
It has no future if they don't find a way to make it easier to develop apps for the Mac if you already have an iOS code base.
John:
Well, the other way to have a future is to sell 100 times more Macs, but that's a tall order.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Like, if you could suddenly sell as many Macs as you sell iPhones, this problem takes care of itself, and people just continue to write an app kit, and you're fine.
John:
But that's not the reality.
John:
Right, exactly.
John:
So one more technical thing on this.
John:
This is not likely, but I like thinking about ways you could possibly get this win.
John:
Another problem Apple has with its platforms, arguably...
John:
And, you know, we can debate what the causes are, but there's a lot of applications, a lot of very sophisticated, very powerful applications that
John:
are only available on the mac and apple would love for those applications to be available on ios devices but for a variety of reasons uh that's not always the case now if you make a unified ui framework depending on how you do it we talked about a shim layer that lets you basically write with a ui kit like api but that calls app kit stuff under the covers as a quicker way to let people reuse some of their code and skills to write mac applications
John:
You could make something like that in the reverse direction to let someone take a complicated, sophisticated Mac application.
John:
and and allow it to run on ios with some changes to make it work for touch i'm sure apple i mean i don't know if apple is frustrated by this but i know a lot of users are frustrated by the fact that there's no photoshop for the ipad right adobe makes a photoshop for the ipad but it's not it's not photoshop photoshop it's like adobe makes a bunch of applications that try to play to the strengths of the ios platform but none of them is full none of them are full-fledged photoshop
John:
And there are other companies trying to pick up that slack to say, fine, Adobe, you're not going to do it.
John:
Trust me, you don't want Adobe to port Photoshop to the iPad.
John:
I know, I'm just saying like capability-wise, like Affinity makes a bunch of great applications.
John:
And what's the other one, the other well-known one?
John:
There's Pixelmator, Pixelmator Pro, Affinity, Acorn, a whole lot of good ones.
John:
Yeah, there's a lot of applications that are targeting it, but there's still a lot of sophisticated applications that are only on the Mac.
John:
And you say, well, it's because the Mac is powerful enough and so on and so forth.
John:
Like all the excuses for why those are only on Mac eventually will come down to, well, it's written in this framework that doesn't run on iOS and we're not going to rewrite our whole application because it's really big and complicated.
John:
I mean, the only companies that can afford to do stuff like that are Microsoft and even their iOS versions are, you know, Microsoft Word and Excel kind of a name only like they're very different.
John:
If you could have a way to make a unified framework and shim layer or something or other that lets a bunch of Mac developers.
John:
with some amount of work that is less than rewriting their entire application, which is, you know, it's pretty easy to hit that bar.
John:
Some smaller amount of work than rewrite everything in UIKit.
John:
Let them sell their well-known, well-established, extremely powerful application for the new 27-inch iPad Pro.
John:
uh that is a compelling case and it solves it solves mac developers problems and that well now suddenly you can address this market with your skills that you have right but that's not why apple cares about that because they'll just let those mac developers retire and die whatever who cares it solves the problem apple has which is hey we would really like it if we could get way more expensive powerful applications on ios
John:
apple's been trying that for a long time that's why the ipad pro exists and it is happening it is happening slowly but one way to get a nice boost of complicated powerful applications if you could somehow make that happen now i think that is not a big enough upside for upside for people to undertake this it kind of goes against what we're trying to get people to do is to get people to stop writing an app kit and who cares about the 10 mac developers compared to the you know thousand x number of them that are on the other platform so i don't think this will happen
John:
But for the briefest moment, I had the idea of like all our greatest and favorite Mac applications suddenly having cool iOS versions and making iOS a more powerful platform and giving new life to Mac developers.
John:
But I think that is extremely unlikely, but it gives me a warm fuzzy to think about it.
Casey:
So one final question, because I can't help myself.
Casey:
Let's assume for the sake of discussion that there's a fairly complete break.
Casey:
And it's not just a shim.
Casey:
It's a completely new HI kit.
Casey:
Do you think that Apple would follow the same delegation everywhere pattern that UIKit has today?
Casey:
And I'm trying to think of a way to summarize delegation easily, and I can't think of a great one.
Marco:
You want it to all be reactive?
Casey:
Well, that's exactly what I'm driving at.
Casey:
And maybe reactive.
John:
AppKit has delegates all over the place, too.
John:
Is that what you're comparing it to?
John:
Delegation, AppKit style, I would say, delegation as compared to React style stuff?
Casey:
Well, like functional reactive programming or something.
Casey:
It doesn't have to be FRP.
Casey:
It doesn't have to be RxSwift necessarily, but like anything that's more modern than delegation, even just closures everywhere, which I admittedly Apple is moving toward, but like something more modern than delegation.
Casey:
Do you think that it would be a slight step forward, such as closures everywhere?
Casey:
Or do you think it would be a whole hog like
Casey:
We're going to just burn the world down and build it anew.
Casey:
Let's go all in on something along the lines of functional reactive programming.
Casey:
And maybe that's not the actual answer, but something that dramatic.
Casey:
Do you think that it would be something that big, this hypothetical HI kit?
Casey:
Or do you think it would be something much closer to a shim?
Casey:
And let me start with Marco on this.
Casey:
It's going to be all Cocoa bindings.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Marco:
No, I mean, I don't honestly like I'm not hugely into the whole reactive thing.
Marco:
I kind of do my own thing with that.
Marco:
But of course.
Marco:
But so I'm not entirely convinced that that is the inevitable forward.
Marco:
Sure.
Marco:
You know, place to go.
Casey:
But whatever the answer.
Casey:
Whatever.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So if you just the larger question of like, would they fundamentally change like
Marco:
design patterns of of the way they do ui framework exactly it depends on like do they want to also like blow up ios as well because if the idea of this is to make developing for the mac more like ios uh then no they shouldn't move on in such a major way because that isn't how ios works
Marco:
But if the goal of this is to be like the next generation unified UI framework for all of their platforms, possibly making it Swift only, then sure, that would make sense.
Marco:
It would make the most sense to design it in a way that takes maximum advantage and fits in best with the design of the Swift language.
Marco:
Which would come with lots of changes that don't work the same way.
Marco:
Because so much of AppKit and UIKit is based on the way Objective-C works.
Marco:
And is designed because it was always the language.
Marco:
It was designed with that in mind.
Marco:
And it was designed with a lot of Objective-C idioms and things that work very well with Objective-C.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
With Swift, there's a lot of weird friction when you try to... When you use UIKit and a lot of Apple frameworks from Swift, you can tell this really wasn't designed for this.
Marco:
And it's not as good as it could be, or it doesn't quite fit in right, doesn't feel right, or is not as graceful as it could be.
Marco:
So if they're going to move forward and make this the new Swift-only thing that is our modern answer, like this is going to be over the next 15 years framework,
Marco:
then yeah, change a lot to make it more Swift-like.
Marco:
Not necessarily like Functional Reactive, but just make it more Swift-like, make it ideal for Swift.
Marco:
But if they're going for, let's make it as easy as possible for existing iOS developers to also make Mac apps, then not necessarily.
John:
So you have to, I think, look at, when you talk about UIKit, and even AppKit for that matter,
John:
Any framework like that that lives for a long time evolves.
John:
And you can see as you look down through the layers of how things have changed.
John:
As Casey pointed out before, before closures were a thing, everything was straight up delegation.
John:
And then suddenly when closures were a thing, even setting aside Swift, it was like, oh...
John:
Now a bunch of new APIs are coming, take a callback, right?
John:
And they take a closure as an argument.
John:
And that becomes a pattern that you start to see.
John:
You don't see it everywhere.
John:
The old APIs don't have it, but they introduce new APIs that do have it.
John:
And so, you know, each new year at WWDC...
John:
the framework that you knew slowly changes and evolves.
John:
Whatever the next framework is, the, the most conservative answer is take whatever the, the current best thinking about UI kit is not like make it like UI kit.
John:
Exactly.
John:
Because there are parts of UI kit that have been updated to use the current best thinking.
John:
And, you know, the closure is the example of like, and that happens to fit with Swift because if it's native support for that and you don't have to use the stupid block syntax and all of this stuff.
John:
Um,
John:
but make all of the new APIs use the current best thinking.
John:
And I don't think that actually entirely precludes a larger change because if you keep doing that, like over time we introduce new APIs with new thinking and there's a new language in the mix and it evolves and evolves and evolves, eventually you get to deprecate or just never use the really old, really weird APIs.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So if your starting point is the current best modern thinking UI kit with maybe some minor tweaks, you get a lot of the benefit of people who are familiar with the UI kit being able to use that.
John:
Because people who are familiar with UI kit presumably are somewhat up to date on it and don't say, I only know how to use the UI kit APIs introduced in like iOS 2.
John:
And I never learned anything after, and I don't know what a closure is, and I'm really confused, right?
John:
I don't know anything about all these property syntax and all this animation stuff.
John:
It's all tint colors.
John:
I don't know what that is.
John:
Of course they have to know.
John:
They have to know the modern ones too.
John:
So if that's your starting point, you can bring those people along.
John:
Now, with the whole reactive thing, it's like that's not something you can gradually add.
John:
That's kind of a paradigm shift, and that is a tougher sell.
John:
But even that...
John:
you could pitch that to pretend the Mac doesn't exist and it's just UIKit.
John:
Eventually, in the lifetime of UIKit, if the thinking inside Apple is that there's a better way to design UIs with whatever reactive paradigm or whatever, some functional thing or something entirely different,
John:
they could roll that out just in UIKit to say a bunch of new APIs are going to be using this thing, and we have a new view system.
John:
Mac has had multiple view systems, even on Mac OS X. It had Carbon and it had Cocoa, and they coexisted for a while, and one of them faded away.
John:
It's not impossible to have two paradigms on the same platform and slowly transition to another one.
John:
So I don't think anything Apple does precludes switching to something better, but I think the main reason that they won't is...
John:
there are two reasons one i'm not i don't think apple is convinced that there is a better paradigm casey may be convinced but i convinced that like there is a better paradigm that is better enough to take the hit for it and be like they can they can defer that they can say use the current best thinking and ui kit plus whatever the current best thinking that we don't know about is that they're doing inside apple right because there's always something every year right
John:
And make that the starting point of your new framework and then go from there.
John:
Um, and I don't, we try to wrap this up because we're running long, but one, one final thing that I think is worth voicing, especially from the concerns of Mac users, I mentioned photos apps and, and how they feel kind of weird.
John:
That's another way that this can all go wrong.
John:
If they, no matter what solution they use, if it lets, uh, experienced iOS developers target the Mac, but the applications they create, uh,
John:
are all like photos essentially like that they feel weird and non-mac like and they're unsatisfying i don't think that will be a very big success because as few mac users as there may as there may be and even mac users who have no idea what it means to be quote unquote mac like mac like
John:
People who have no idea what Electron is or no idea what makes Slack weird, they feel the friction and the weirdness even if they can't identify it.
John:
Even with something like Chrome versus Safari.
John:
I think that's a real thing that people can feel.
John:
And I, and I think the Mac enthusiasts are actually an important subset of the Mac market at a proportion of their, of their, the money that they give or whatever, right?
John:
It's the whole reason the Mac pro exists or will exist eventually.
John:
And I think that is a really, it's going to be one of the hardest things to avoid.
John:
Yes.
John:
Let people retarget their skills to the Mac, but,
John:
But how are you going to get them to make applications that are satisfying Mac applications?
John:
That's a really tall order, both because iOS users don't know how to make a satisfying Mac application because they never have before.
John:
And because a lot of things you can do to make it easier for them, lead them down the path to an application that is like an iOS application that you can use a mouse cursor with.
John:
And that's no good.
John:
That's no good, boss.
John:
Well, but, I mean, I would argue it's better than not having these apps.
John:
Is it, though?
John:
Like, that's what I'm saying.
John:
I don't know if it's better than not having the apps.
John:
Like, is it better than just letting the Mac platform die?
John:
I would rather have a good native 27-inch iPad Pro application than a bad iOS port to a 27-inch iMac.
John:
You know what I mean?
Marco:
Like, just... Sure.
Marco:
Well, but, you know, keep in mind, like, whatever Mac apps are in practice is what ends up being, you know, the good Mac apps.
Marco:
Like, it ends up being the standard.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
I really don't think we have a choice here.
Marco:
I think something like this has to happen to keep the Mac alive.
Marco:
And so if what ends up being most Mac apps people use, if those are more iOS-y, that will just become what it feels like to be a standard Mac app.
John:
And that's not I said that I was getting before what it means to be Mac like but I'm just talking about like just straight up performance like that they feel laggy and slow and not not powerful like that they don't have the features one part is a feature set and the second is that they're that they're slow and weird.
John:
And is it because they're slow and weird because of the shim layer?
John:
And are they missing features that we expect from a Mac app because they're an iOS port and those features don't fit or don't make sense on iOS?
John:
That's what I'm talking about.
Marco:
And you're totally right to be super concerned about that by using Photos app as the example of a cross-platform framework.
Marco:
But the reason why Photos app on the Mac is slow and weird and doesn't feel right and it lacks so many features and drives you nuts is because it is a 10%.
Marco:
terribly designed app on so many levels and horribly neglected all the time so it starts out with a bad design they never change it they never make it better in your your explanation during our famous episode number 223 throw the fork away was so great so perfect the photos app is a terrible example of how to do cross-platform frameworks it happens to be built on a cross-platform framework and
John:
but it is a terrible design and that has nothing to do with the framework it has everything to do with the actual ui design the flow of the app the things like i don't you think it has to do with the framework and that it like the the flow and the ui design is inherited in large part from how photos works in ios and then they just added a couple little sidebars here and there like it feels like an ios application in design wise
Marco:
no definitely not it is it is entirely because that is a very badly designed app it was it's designed by people who don't use it the way anybody else uses it if at all and it is designed to look good in demos not to actually be used by human beings that is not a problem with the framework that's a problem with the just the design of it it is slow and cumbersome not because it copies ios stuff but because it has
Marco:
too many modes and too many slow animations and it lacks convenient keyboard shortcuts.
Marco:
But I'm getting it.
John:
It has those modes because photos on iOS has to have the modes because you don't have the room on the screen for all that stuff.
John:
So think about when you go to crop on photos.
John:
You've got to hit the little crop icon or you go to color or light.
John:
Then you've got all the submenus and you eventually dig your way down to the feature you want.
John:
And it's a lot of taps.
John:
And why is it a lot of taps?
John:
Because you're on a phone.
John:
You don't have room to have that stuff visible all the time.
John:
But you take that UI paradigm and you bring it to the Mac and
John:
And it's still a lot of taps.
John:
You're like, why are you making this a lot of taps?
John:
Like, well, this is sort of how the code base works.
John:
And we kind of added a sidebar here and there, but we didn't want to change too much.
John:
Like, isn't that the whole thing?
John:
We don't have to change too much and we get a Mac application out of it.
John:
And it's like, you should have changed more.
Marco:
That isn't the whole thing.
Marco:
Like, first of all, the fact that they use something called like UX collection view.
Marco:
doesn't make the design bad.
Marco:
The fact that their views are using UX color instead of NS color and UI color, that's what we're asking for here.
Marco:
Give us stock widgets and stuff that we can use in both places.
Marco:
But the actual interface layout and the choices they made with all these different modes and everything, that's just a bad design for the Mac, period.
Marco:
And it has nothing to do with the framework.
Marco:
That is entirely to do with laziness and bad design.
John:
But no, it doesn't have to do with the framework.
John:
It has to do with the fact that the code base came from an iOS app.
John:
You started with an iOS app and you're like, I would like this app on the Mac.
John:
So you start with that code base and that code base works the way it works on the phone.
John:
And so you don't want it completely like you're motivated not to change too much about it.
John:
Right.
John:
So it's not the framework.
John:
It's not the fact that if you had written it from scratch with the same framework as a Mac app.
John:
you would be fine.
John:
But my fear, what I'm getting at here is that people have iOS applications that they want to essentially port to the Mac.
John:
And they're not starting from scratch and figuring out how to make a good Mac app.
John:
They're starting from their iOS app and mutating it until they feel like it's more or less a Mac app.
John:
And so the photos app feels like the iOS photos app mutated just enough to masquerade as a Mac application.
John:
And you're totally right.
John:
That's not the fault of the framework.
John:
It's not the fault of even UXKit or anything like that.
John:
It is the fault of the fact that it is essentially a port and that you start with one code base and you change it and, you know, you don't start over from scratch, right?
John:
And we're going way too long here.
John:
But one of the things that Craig Hockenberry was pointing out about, like, Twitterific, where IconFactory wrote their own framework to basically be UIKit on the Mac, what was called Chameleon or something?
John:
Yep.
John:
right so they have experience doing that hey let's write a framework on the mac but the apis all look like ui kit they did that and they also did uh let's make a mac version of an ios application and we'll do it by cleanly and slightly painfully because you know programmers aren't perfect separating the
John:
the internals from the externals which all programmers are supposed to be doing but until you actually try to separate them with a big scissor you realize how much your crap has leaked into each other like it's life right and according to craig the second approach for them anyway worked better for twitterific where what they reused across the ios and the mac app is all the faceless stuff but the ui for the mac app
John:
is written totally from scratch the only part that shared is the inside now they wrote it from i don't even know what they use they could have written it from scratch using you know the chameleon thing they could have written it from scratch using app kit they could have written from scratch using a hypothetical hi kit but the point is they wrote it from scratch they didn't take the interface from the phone port it and start tweaking it
John:
But that I think will be a temptation.
John:
It's sort of the equivalent of shovelware.
John:
That will be a temptation if Apple does a good job making that easy.
John:
And in fact, Apple will demo that.
John:
Look, I went from your phone application and then I just moved two things around and added a sidebar and set up a few menu items.
John:
Voila, Mac app.
John:
And I'm going to say, no, not a Mac app.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Casper, Squarespace, and HelloFresh.
John:
We will see you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long
John:
Good thing so much stuff happened in the... Seven days ago.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
So Marco, you said you had watched the first two episodes of the Grand Tour?
Casey:
I have, yeah.
Casey:
You know what?
Casey:
It's pretty good.
Casey:
I feel like the in-studio segments...
Casey:
are slightly less garbagey than they were last season.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
To clarify, I skipped those.
Casey:
But still pretty bad.
Marco:
I don't skip the little bumpers to their segment, but when they sit down with a celebrity or something, I skip that.
Marco:
But I always did that with the BBC show also.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
The BBC show, the in-studio segments were pretty decent, if not good.
Casey:
But man, the grand tour in the studio is bad.
Casey:
Outside of the studio, I think the films where they're actually out in the world doing things.
Casey:
I think those are 80 to 90 percent of what they were for Top Gear.
Casey:
And I'm trying very hard not to spoil anything directly for John.
Casey:
But my goodness, the studio stuff is just nothing.
Casey:
I feel like all I'm doing is cringing the entire time they're in the studio.
Marco:
Oh, absolutely.
Marco:
Yeah, there's no question.
Marco:
The studio stuff is still as cringeworthy as it was in season one.
Marco:
But season two, episodes one and two, if you skip the studio long parts and you just pay attention to the rest of the film segments...
Marco:
I'd say it's very good, very fun, and the last few seasons of Top Gear that they were on, there was a bit of a decline in those, too.
Marco:
And I would say the current season of whatever this is, Grand Tour, is on par with or better than the last few seasons of Top Gear they did.
Casey:
I think that's fair.
John:
You know, one of the in-studio segments that I actually kind of liked and I think is the strength that they should be leaning on in Grand Tour, but in season one, apparently they did not.
John:
I always like the news segments because I guess it's because it's the most like a podcast.
John:
Like they would have a little TV screen up there to show an image and they'd be like...
John:
just quick hits on the news oh you know volkswagen's coming out with a new car what do you think of this and they all just have something snarky to say about it in much the same way we do on a podcast what do you think of the news they talk about right and there's no celebrity involved and you can't say they're not trying to be funny because they are they're trying to be funny and very often the snarky lines were written ahead of time clearly right like it wasn't all spontaneous or whatever but
John:
that lets them be them in a way in the same way that they would out of the studio just sort of joking around with each other about a topic that they all have strong feelings about you think all the portion 911s look the same you are into trucks you are like whatever like their personalities and their enthusiasm for cars which you know is my always big thing with top gear um comes through in those segments and their studio segments and they're fine and even some of the celebrity ones depending on the celebrity
John:
passable but anything where it's like we're not going to talk about car news we're not going to talk about cars we're not going to talk to a celebrity we're going to do like a funny skit with each other uh did not work in the green door like just just like because because like what's left then then it's just like a bunch of people who are like are they trying to be saturday night live very often they'd be trying to make a joke they'd be like huh huh isn't that funny and they'd be like making fun of like you know children with cancer and be like no
John:
it's not it's not funny it's like but it was it was funny when i was a boy in 1942 it's like just guys like you can't talk to somebody before you you do these segments like it's not or whatever the one where they were making fun of gay people are hurting ice cream or something like it's like just talk to one person before you plan a 15 minute segment that you think is going to be hilarious because it's it's
John:
It's not and it's no good.
Casey:
And anyway, there's a lot more of that.
Casey:
It's definitely like older dudes who think that some of this stuff is funny and it's just not funny anymore.
Casey:
And the other thing on the second episode, they official maybe they talked about it in the first.
Casey:
But in the second episode is the first time they really did a hot lap, if I recall correctly.
Casey:
And they have ditched the American and they said something like, yeah, well, you know, it didn't really work out and nobody liked it.
Casey:
And so there was at least a modicum of self-awareness there.
Casey:
But they bring on a woman, some woman, and they say she's a really great driver.
Casey:
And the reason I haven't named this woman is because they didn't name her.
Casey:
Did you watch this, Marco?
Casey:
Did you notice that as well?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
She was like the new Stig, kind of.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
I assume that was part of some kind of bit that's going to play out over time, but I thought that was weird, too.
Casey:
It just seemed like, I don't know if inappropriate is the right word, but just not funny.
Casey:
It seemed like, you know, 50 plus year old guys trying to be funny in a way that in the year almost 2018 really isn't funny anymore.
Casey:
And I don't think this is me being like a stick in the mud.
Casey:
I don't think this is me.
Casey:
being a social justice warrior it's just it's i'm trying to be better about being aware of these sorts of things and and so now that i am more aware of these sorts of things when they don't name this woman driver like they praised her but they don't name her it's just like come on guys really this is really a thing and just like you said john like nobody told you this was not cool
Casey:
Nobody, not a one, not a single person said that this was not cool.
Casey:
And so I've never fast forwarded on an initial viewing.
Casey:
I've never fast forwarded any of Top Gear or the Grand Tour.
Casey:
Oh, you're missing out.
Casey:
Well, that's the thing.
Casey:
I was about to say, I am paying less and less and less attention to the in-studio segments.
Casey:
That being said, the films I thought were really good, particularly this last one.
Casey:
And again, I'm trying not to spoil it, but it involves Marco and John's either current or old stomping grounds.
Casey:
That one I thought was really good and enjoyable.
Casey:
So the films are great, but golly, the studio stuff, I'm running out of patience for it.
Marco:
There is no question in my mind that if the show was just the films and each episode was like, you know, I guess it'd be like 20 minutes long or 25 minutes long instead of like an hour.
Marco:
If it was just that, it would be a better show.
Casey:
I mean, I'm looking forward to the rest of the episodes from this season, but I might do the unthinkable and pull a Marco and just skip the in-studio segments because, oh boy.
Marco:
I give you permission.
Marco:
It is a much more enjoyable show if you do that.
Marco:
all right so we're gonna look at some titles here we had some good ones this week as i get older i guess worse yeah that's pretty good i like hot box with knobs hot box with knobs does little boxes does the usb pre 2 get hot no uh let me see no nope not even not at all not even not even my description is not i've never had one of those boxes i just assume they got hot but no
John:
Hotbox, Hotbox, you guys don't know that movie, do you?
John:
Nope.
John:
Casey should watch it.
Marco:
Marco might like it.
Marco:
Yeah, my final vote is either for Old or Worse or Hotbox with Knobs.
John:
Hmm, I like them both.
John:
Hotbox with Knobs definitely has a musical ring to it and seems like an ATP title.
John:
but now now that i learned the boxes don't get hot i like it less i mean some of them do like the shitty ones do well does there any speaking of shitty ones does your stuff get hot oh my god yes there we go you you do have some hot boxes with knobs all right
Marco:
yeah because it's like a you know it's a class a b amp um the smaller ones like i had one that was a class a my god like even just a headphone amp that's class a it gets ridiculously hot yeah i i that puts hot box with knobs over the top fantastic mr fox watch it watch it with the kids it's a good kid movie even declan might like it heard of this and then you'll see where i am saying to recommend that because hot box features in the movie
Marco:
Isn't that a euphemism for, like, farting in bed, isn't it?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
I'm glad you caught that as well.
Casey:
Well, that's not just hotbox.
Marco:
Isn't it also like when you, like, smoke pot in the car with the windows up?
Marco:
What do you call it?
Marco:
Dutch oven?
Marco:
Come on, chat room.
Casey:
No, you're right.
Casey:
You're right.
John:
We don't need to go to the chat room for fart confirmation.
John:
Casey is there with the...
Casey:
Oh, when it comes to farts, I know what I'm talking about.
Casey:
That was a title for you.
Casey:
Do farts ever stop being funny?
Casey:
I don't think so.
Marco:
Well, because, like, humor is rooted in just, like, what makes people, like, uncomfortable, like, in a certain way.
Marco:
And, like, farts are just so against...
Marco:
the facade that we are not animals we are we are like civilized people and then like this bad smelling gas comes out of our butts like that's that's going to be funny like who'd have thunk it and and like it's so taboo and like and it makes the whole room smell bad for like 10 minutes and so it's like that's like that's going to be if that's always going to be funny across all cultures across all times because we try so hard to pretend like we're not animals with butts and poop and stuff and then this reminds us
Marco:
Anyway, that's my theory on farts.
Marco:
Good thing we're still alive.
Marco:
Good talk.
Marco:
You should make an app about that.
Marco:
I hear they're all the rage.
Marco:
Yeah, right.